472 



The Museum Gazette 



The pedigree of the elephant has not as yet been deter- 

 mined with exactitude. The distinctions of genera and 

 species are, after all, matters of convenience in classification 

 rather than of nature. Between the genus Mastodon and the 

 genus Elephas there were certainly blood relationships. Was 

 the latter related to the former in direct line, or only collater- 

 ally ? Which of the mastodons comes nearest to the elephants, 

 and which of the elephants carries the fewest traces of 

 mastodon relationship ? 



Several of the many fossil species of elephant approached 

 the mastodon much more nearly than do either of the two 

 surviving ones. Our distinguished English authorities remark 

 that the transition is so gradual "that it is very difficult 

 to know where to draw the line between the two." 1 



There is, of course, no doubt but that the genus Mastodon long 

 preceded that of Elephas, and that the two, each represented 

 by many species, lived contemporaneously for a time. Gradu- 

 ally in all regions Elephas supplanted Mastodon, or masto- 

 dons declined. Mastodon has now in all its species been 

 long extinct, and so also have all the earlier types of Elephas 

 which exhibited teeth resembling those of mastodon. 



In the Museum of the College of Surgeons there is a good 

 series of teeth of elephants and mastodons. No. 2,645, 

 M. angustidens, shows features most like those of Elephas 

 africanus, and 2,646 is not very dissimilar. 



Elephas clifti and Elephas bombifrons, although their plates 



1 " In the African elephant the molars are of coarse construction, with 

 fewer and larger plates and thicker enamel." 



Some extinct species "approach so closely in the breadth and coarseness 

 of the ridges and paucity of cement to Mastodon as to have been placed by 

 some zoologists in that genus." 



" The stegodont group is peculiar to the Eastern parts of the old world, and 

 connects the true elephants intimately with the mastodons." — Flower and 

 Lydekker pp. 427,431. 



