EXTINCTI05T OIT THE MAMMOTH — JTEITTTLLE. S2d 
VastW more acceptable is the hypothesis of a diminution in food 
supply. As Georges Poiichet says, the struggle is much more be- 
tween the- herbivore and the vegetation than between the carnivore 
and the herbivore. However, with the frozen remains of Siberian 
mammoths and rhinoceroses occur the traces of a relatively abun- 
dant vegetation, the presence of which Mr. de Lapparent has ex- 
plained by admitting that the Siberian climate was then more humid 
and more oceanic, a fact for which he supplies a geographical ex- 
planation; the same author recalls, moreover, that in spite of the 
severity of the climate and the meagerness of the pasturage immense 
herds of herbivores exist on the high Tibetan plateaus. It should 
be noted that at that time the Siberian vegetation was arborescent 
up to the seventy-fourth parallel (von Toll: Liakhof Islands) and 
that arborescent vegetation is precisely the kind which suits pro- 
boscidians according to what nature now teaches us.^ The coin- 
cidence between a lessening of the food supply and the extinction of 
the mammoths therefore remains hypothetical, and the very authors 
who explain the latter by the former furnish arguments against their 
own hypothesis. A progressively aggi'avated stringency of food 
miglit have contributed tov^ard the degeneration of the species, to- 
ward lessening the number of its representatives and finally to its 
disappearance ; but it is impossible to admit, at least without falling 
back on the assumption of sudden cataclysms, that the mammoths 
allowed themselves individually to die of hunger on the icy ground 
which preserved their remains. 
It is not exaggerated to conclude from what precedes that the 
question of the causes of the disappearance of the mammoth re- 
mains open, both as to the general extinction of the species and as to 
the very numerous individual cases in which death took place under 
such conditions that the corpses were immediately frozen. 
It was without the idea of solving this problem that I undertook, 
a few 3'ears ago, the study of the integument of the mammoth. I 
had previously familiarized myself with the anatomical study of the 
elephants. The laboratorj'^ of comparatiA^^e anatomj?- at the Paris 
Museum having then received a very well preserved piece of mam- 
moth skin, I made some histological sections from this specimen. 
Somewhat later Mr. Boule kindly assigned to me, pro parte, the 
study of the mammoth which Count Stenbok-Fermor had just pre- 
sented to the laboratory of paleontology. This was an opportunity 
for me to examine more closely the questions relating to the mam- 
* Tn the wild state elephants like herbage, but the staple of their diet consists of young 
branches and shoots ; thus open forests or high brush in which they can easily move about 
and find their food are, with some differences between the elephants of Africa and those of 
Asia, the ranges that are preferred. 
