EXTINCTION OF ThE MAMMOTH — NEUVILLE. S35 
The presence of the rims or horny excrescences which thus sur- 
rounded the soles of the hind feet of the latter proboscidians, espe- 
cially when developed to the extreme degree shown by certain indi- 
viduals, must have peculiarly interfered with walking, even on nearly 
bare soil, and must have made it practically impossible on ground 
covered with brushwood. There is a great difference between these 
conditions which may, I think, be called unhealthy, and the adaptive 
characters shown by certain ungulates which habitually live in 
marshy regions, Limnotragus^ for instance. For the mammoths this 
was a cause of weakness which it seems to me necessary to point out. 
In view of the group of conditions thus enumerated is it still pos- 
sible to regard the mammoth as having undergone a process of 
adaptation conferring on it a special power of resistance to the hard- 
ships of a habitat under a glacial climate ? I do not believe so. 
If it had been able to flee before the invasion of the cold and to reach 
temperate or hot regions, perhaps the mammoth would have survived 
like the present-day elephants, of which it shows itself to be in 
general such a near relative. But it probably did not have the 
faculty of adaptation whicli we see existing in the elephants and of 
which we can analyze some important details. Not having been able, 
for reasons which I can not trace, to leave the regions which had 
become particularly inhospitable to it, the mammoth was perhaps 
subject to the effects of an alimentation made more and more difficult 
by the gradual depauperization of the vegetation. In any event, it 
was subjected in a specially inexorable manner to the attacks of the 
cold against which it was ill protected. In a general way this cold 
must have caused the species to degenerate ; moreover the individual 
accidents which it occasioned could not help being frequent. 
Attempts have been made to trace in detail the causes of death in 
some of the individuals found frozen. Traumatisms occasioned by 
falls into crevasses or by land slides certaiidy brought many of 
these individuals to their death. The Beresowka mammoth pre- 
sents a good example of this; multiple fractures with vascular rup- 
tures and extensive hemorrhages, the whole seeming to indicate a 
is particularly applicable to the supernumerary nails which the elephant sometimes shows 
as well as the mammoth. The description, already cited, by Perrault is very instructive iu 
this respect. The Versailles elephant (from the Congo) showed such pseudo-ungiial 
growths having a length up to 13 inches and " twisted in a very odd fashion." '• It was 
necessary," Perrault adds, " to saw them off, because these excrescences were in the 
elephant's way when walking" p. 104). In the case of this kind which I examined iu 
an Asiatic elephant the nails, as in the mammoth, showed an irregular wall bearing 
transverse very irregular thickened rings whose presence and whose characters gave 
evidence of an altogether erratic growth. Strictly speaking the nails were not hyper- 
truphied unless in length ; the portion called keraphyll extended from base to tix). The 
whole structure bore the marks of an irregular development and not of a simple hyper- 
trophy. Structures formed in this way are, I insist, wholly inadaptive. Once more it is 
to be insisted, such anomalies, carried so far, are for the elephant the result of menagerie 
life, while ifor the Siberian mammoth they were natural, related apparently to special 
conditions of habitat to which the animal was unable to react by the acquisition of 
adaptive characters, anomalies which in the end brought on its disappearance. 
