SCIENTIFIC SUMMARY. 
427 
large bones, commonly black, and often pyriteous. These are the remains 
of large mammals, which lived on the old land. There is the hippopo- 
tamus buried in the mud of the river in which he swam ; the elephant 
among the trees which were his food ; and the rhinoceros, and many 
others, are there too. Such is the Norfolk Forest bed, specially interest- 
ing as the earliest deposit known to contain the Mammoth. 
This species, the Elephas primigenius, is the most abundant of the 
English fossil elephants : it has, too, the widest range in space, and the 
longest duration in time. Authentic specimens are found throughout 
England, France, Germany, and Italy, as far south as Rome. Thence it 
ranges across the steppes of Russia, through Siberia to Arctic America, 
and east and south to Texas. With a distribution so wide, believed to be 
the result of slow migration, it would be natural to expect a long-continued 
existence in time. 
Its teeth are met with in Central Italy, in a volcanic gravel believed to 
be nearly, if not quite, as old as the Forest bed. The matrix abounds in 
crystals of Leucite and other minerals ; so that the species certainly in- 
habited that district when the extinct Latian volcanoes were active. 
Although it is certain that as the Glacial period advanced a few ice-clad 
hills were all that remained above the sea of England, so that its mammals 
must have died off and migrated ; yet no sooner was the country dry land 
again, with wood, and river, and lake, than the species became as abundant 
as ever. In the gravels which were then forming, its remains are plenti- 
fully preserved, and it not unfrequently occurs in caves. There is here no 
variation in its character ; nor do any of the specimens found in this, or 
more recent accumulations, indicate those changes which intervening space 
and time are generally found to have effected. Immutable he lives on, 
giving no indication of whence he came. The existing elephant of India 
is the known form most nearly resembling it, but there is nothing to 
suggest that he went thither, nor is there any evidence to support the 
supposition that a species which endured endless migrations, and changes 
of food and climate, for so long a period, was at last so rapidly metamor- 
phosed into the Indian animal that no trace of the process can be found. 
When the species occurs in the gravel, the Rhinoceros etruscus, and many 
of its companions in the old Forest age, have disappeared, and are replaced 
by Rhinoceros tickorldnus, and many new forms. This rhinoceros in its 
turn dies out, and yet the mammoth shows no signs of being on the 
wane. 
The next most recent beds in which it is met with are the frozen Siberian 
gravels, whence traders in fossil ivory have collected its tusks for ages. A 
skeleton, with much of the skin on the head, is preserved at St. Petersburg, 
and, according to Von Middendorf, many entire carcases have since been 
discovered. 
Then comes a turbary deposit in the Apennine valley of the Chiana, 
in Tuscany, where most of its old associates are absent, and it is now 
accompanied by the more modern animals, Cervus Megaceros, Bison prisons, 
and Bos primigenius, species characterizing bogs and latest accumulations, 
and which were probably exterminated by man, — the Bos primigenius being 
certainly slain with stone celts by early Britons. 
