THE STORY OF THE ELEPHANTS 273 
of the European fossil elephants were distinct in species from 
both the African and the Indian elephant, the only two living 
species (EL africanus and El. indicus). This fundamental fact 
opened out to him new views about the creation of the world 
and its inhabitants, and a rapid glance over other fossil bones in 
his collection showed him the truth and the value of this great 
idea (namely, the existence of extinct types), to which he con- 
secrated the rest of his life. Thus palaeontology may be said to 
have been founded on the Mammoth. 
The fossil remains of elephants have, on account of their 
common occurrence in various parts of the world, attracted 
a great deal of attention, both from the learned and the 
unlearned. In the north of Europe they have been found in 
Ireland, in Germany ; in Central Europe, in Poland, Middle and 
South Russia, Greece, Spain, Italy; also in Africa, and over a 
large part of Asia. In the Rew World they have been found 
abundantly in North America. But in the frozen regions of 
Siberia their tusks, teeth, and bones are met with in very great 
abundance. According to Pallas, the great Russian savant, there 
is not in the whole of Asiatic Russia, from the Don to the 
extremity of the Tchutchian promontory, any brook or river on 
the banks of which some bones of elephants and other animals 
foreign to these regions have not been found. The primaeval 
elephants (Mammoth, Mastodon, etc.) appear to have formerly 
ranged over the whole northern hemisphere of the globe, from the 
fortieth parallel to the sixtieth, and possibly to near the seventieth 
degree of latitude. 
Just as the North American Indian regards the great bones of 
Professor Marsh’s extinct Eocene mammals that peep out from 
the sides of buttes and canons, as belonging to his ancestors, 
so we find that in all parts of the world the bones of extinct 
T 
