330 ANNUAL HEPORT SMlTHSONIAIsT INSTITUTION, I9l9. 
moth, and the readers of rAnthropologie are already acquainted 
with the investigations which I made with Mr. Gautrelet regarding 
the blood of this animalJ 
The results relating to the integument appeared to me especially 
instructive. Theypresent facts which are incompatible with the gen- 
erally accepted opinions regarding adaptation to cold which I have 
alluded to above. I shall merely recapitulate the essential points 
about these facts, referring, for more details, to two previously pub- 
lished notes.^ 
Plate 1 represents the piece of skin received by the laboratory 
of comparative anatomy. It is easy to distinguish two lands of hair 
which I consider, without going into the discussions which have 
arisen relative to the distinctions to be established in the hairy cover- 
ing of the mammoths, as representing merely bristles, long and 
scattered, and a very dense underfur. One can also see the thick- 
ness of the dermis, forming a baconlike layer. 
To understand the meaning of these conditions it is necessary to 
compare them with those presented by the elephants which live in 
the tropical zone and for which there can not be any question of 
adaptation to cold. Plate 2 shows the essential characters of the 
skin of the elephants. Few hairs are to be seen; abundant on the 
young, which at birth is covered with a uniform down sufficiently 
sparse so that the grain of the skin remains easily visible, it after- 
wards becomes less dense simultaneously with the diiferentiating of 
the bristles and underfur. Without ever forming a thick fur, these 
hairs are often much more numerous on subjects living in freedom 
than the menagerie elephants would lead one to suppose. The 
dermis is here quite as thick and quite as baconlike as in the mam- 
moths. 
In the skin of the elephants, that which especially strikes the at- 
tention is the .warty character of the epidermis. While the epider- 
mis of the mammoths is almost smooth, that of the elephants, both 
African and Asiatic, is very coarsely rugose. The dermal papillae 
of these latter proboscidians are covered with a strong epithelial 
coating in which the corneous layer predominates, and each papilla 
retains its individuality in such a way that the cutaneous covering 
appears shagrinous, or, rather, definitely warty; this aspect, more 
or less pronounced according to the regions of the body, is not yet 
present in the new born, in which the grain of the skin appears 
to be exactly like that of the mammoth, but it afterwards becomes 
steadily more accentuated. Plate 3 explains this structure. T have 
7 L'Anthropologie, vol. 26, p. 298. 1915. 
3 H. Neuville, Du tc^gument des proboscicUens. Bull. Mus. Hist. Nat. Paris, 1817, No. 6, 
and Sur quelques particularites du tfegumt'ot des Elephants et sur les comparaisous qu'elles 
EUgg&rent. Ibid., 1918, No. 5. 
