XXVI.—Skeleton of the Mammoth in the St. Petersburg Museum.

Beside the skeleton of this famous Mammoth there is placed that of an Indian Elephant, and another Elephant with skin and hair^ in order that the visitor may have a proper appreciation of the vast proportions of the Mammoth, as compared with them. Plate XXVI., on the opposite page, represents the saloon of the Museum of St, Petersburg, which contains these three interesting remains.

Fig. 182.— Tilanimoth restored.

In i860 a great number of bones of the Mammoth, ^vith remains of Hyaena, Horse, Reindeer, Rhinoceros-megarhinus, and Bison, were found in Belgium in digging a canal at Lierre, in the province of Antwerp. An entire skeleton of a young Mammoth, eleven feet six inches high (to the shoulder), has been reconstructed from these remains by M. Dupont, and is now placed in the Royal Museum of Natural History in Brussels.*

1. Woodward, Geological Magazine, vol. viii., p. 193.

We cannot doubt, after such testimony, of the existence in the frozen north, of the almost entire remains of the Mammoth. The animals seem to have perished suddenly; enveloped in ice at the moment of their death, their bodies have been preserved from decomposition bythe continued action of the cold. If we suppose that one of those animals had sunk into a marsh which froze soon afterwards, or had fallen accidentally into the crevasse of some glacier, it would be easy for us to understand how its body, buried immediately under eternal ice, had remained there for thousands of years without undergoing decomposition.

In Cuvier's great work on fossil bones, he gives a long and minute enumeration of the various regions of Germany, France, Italy, and other countries, which have furnished in our days bones or tusks of the Mammoth. We venture to quote two of these descriptions:— *' In October, 1816," he says, "there was discovered at Seilberg, near Canstadt, in WUrtemberg, near which some remarkable discoveries were made in 1700, a very remarkable deposit, which the

king, Frederick' I., caused to be excavated, and its contents collected with the greatest care. We are even assured that the visit which the prince, in his ardour for all that was great, paid to this spot, aggra-vated the malady of which he died a few days after. An officer, Herr Natter, commenced some excavations, and in four-and- twenty hours discovered twenty-one teeth or fragments of teeth of elephant, mixed with a great number of bones. The king having ordered him to continue the excavations, on the second day they came upon a group of thirteen tusks heaped close upon each other, and along with them some molar teeth, lying as if they had been packed artificially. It was on this discovery that the king caused himself to be transported thither, and ordered all the surrounding soil to be dug up, and every object to be carefully preserved in its original position. The largest of the tusks, though it had lost its points and its roots, was still eight feet long and one foot in diameter. Many isolated tusks were also found, with a quantity of molar teeth, from two inches to a foot in length, some still adhering to the jaws. All these fragments were better preserved than those of 1700, which was attributed to the depth of the bed, and, perhaps, to the nature of the soil. The tusks were generally much curved. In the same deposit some bones of Horses and Stags were found, together with a quantity of teeth of the Rhinoceros, and others which were thought to belong to a Bear, and one specimen which was attributed to the Tapir. The place where this discovery was made is named Seilberg; it is about 600 paces from the city of Canstadt, but on the opposite side of the Necker.

MAMMOTH, ELEPHANT, AND CAVE BEAR. 39/

" All the great river basins of Germany have, like those of the Necker, yielded fossil bones of the Elephant; those especially abutting on the Rhine are too numerous to be mentioned, nor is Canstadt the only place in the valley of the Necker where they are

found."'But of all parts of Europe, that in which they are found in greatest numbers is the valley of the Upper Arno. We find there a perfect cemetery of Elephants. These bones were at one time so common in this valley, that the peasantry employed them, indiscriminately with stones, in constructing walls and houses. Since they have learned their value, however, they reserve them for sale to travellers. The bones and tusks of the Mammoth are met with in America as well as in the Old World, scattered through Canada, Oregon, and the Northern States as far south as the Gulf of Mexico. Cuvier enumerates several places on that continent where their remains are met with, mingled with those of the Mastodon. The Russian Lieutenant Kotzebue found them on the north coast of America, in

the cliffs of frozen mud in Eschsholtz Bay, within Behring's Strait, and in other distant parts of the shores of the Arctic Seas, where they were so common that the sailors burnt many pieces in their fires. It is very strange that the East Indies, that is, one of the only two regions which is now the home of the Elephant, should be almost the only country in which the fossil bones of these animals have not been discovered. In short, from the preceding enumeration, it appears that, during the geological period whose history we are recording the gigantic Mammoth inhabited most regions of the globe. Now-adays, the only climates which are suited for the existing race of Elephants are those of Africa and India, that is to say, tropical countries; from which we must draw the conclusions to which so many other inferences lead, that, at the epoch in which these animals lived, the temperature of the earth was much higher than in our days; or, more probably, the extinct race of Elephants must have been adapted for living in a colder climate than that which they now require. Among the antediluvian Carnivora, one 01 the most formidable seems to have been the Vrsiis spelceus, or Cave-bear (Fig. 183). This species must have been a fifth, if not a fourth, larger than the Brown Bear of our days. It was also more squat: some of the skeletons we possess are from nine to ten feet long, and only about six feet high. The U. spela.us abounded in England, France, Belgium,

and Germany; and so extensively in the latter country, that the teeth of the antediluvian Bear, as we have already stated, formed for a long time part of its materia medica, under the name oi fossil Jicorn. Fig. 183 represents the skull of the Cave-bear.

At the same time with the Ursiis spelcEus another Carnivore, the Fells spelceiis, or Cave-lion, lived in Europe. This animal is specifically identical with the living Lion of Asia and Africa: but since in these early times he had not to contend with the hunter for food, he was, on the whole, considerably larger than any Lion now existing on the earth. The Hycenas of our age consist of two species, the striped and the

Fi^. 183. — Head of Ursus spelasus.

Spotted Hyenas. The last presents considerable conformity in its structure with that of the Post-pliocene period, which Cuvier designates under the name of the fossil Spotted Hyaena. It seems to have been only a little larger than the existing species. Fig. 184 represents the head of the Hycena spelaa^ whose remains, with those of others, were found in the caves of Kirkdale and Kent's Hole; the remains of about 300 being found in the former. Dr. Buckland satis-lied himself, from the quantity of their dung, that the Hycenas had lived there. In the cave were found remains of the ox, y©ung elephant, rhinoceros, horse, bear, wolf, hare, water-rat, and several birds. AH the bones present an appearance of having been broken and gnawed by the teeth of the Hyaenas, and they occur confusedly mixed in loam or mud, or dispersed through the crust of stalagmite v/hich covered the contents of the cave.

The Horse dates from the Quaternary epoch, if not from the last period of the Tertiary epoch. Its remains are found in the same rocks with those of the Mammoth and the Rhinoceros. It is dis^ tinguished from our existing Horse only by its size, which was smaller — its remains abound in the Post-pliocene rocks, not only in Europe, but in America; 50 that an aboriginal Horse existed in the New World long before it was carried thither by the Spaniards, although we know that it was unknown at the date of their arrival. " Certainly itis a marvellous fact in the history of the Mammalia, that in South America, a native horse should have lived and disapppeared, to be succeeded in after ages by the countless herds descended from

the few introduced with the Spanish colonists!'""^

Fig. 1S4.— Head of Hysna spelsea.

The Oxen of the period, if not identical with, were at least very near to our living species. There were three species: the Bisojt prisciis, B. primigeniiis, and B. Pallasii; the first with slender legs, with convex frontal, broader than it was high, and differing but slightly from the Aurochs, except in being taller and by having larger liorns. The remains of Bison prisms are found in England, France, Italy, Germany, Russia, and America. Bison primigcnius was, according to Cuvier, the source of our domestic cattle. The Bos Pallasii is found in America and in Siberia, and resembles in many respects the Musk-ox of Canada.

Where these great Mammals are found we generally discover the fossil remains of several species of Deer. The palaeontological

** Danvin's Journal," p. 130.

question as regards these animals is very obscure, and it is often difficult to determine whether the remains belong to an extinct or an existing species. This doubt does not extend, however,, to the gigantic forest-stag, Cerviis megacc?'os, one of the most magnificent of the antediluvian animals, whose remains are still frequently found in Ireland in the neighbourhood of Dublin; more rarely in France, Germany, Poland, and Italy. Intermediate between the Fallow-deer and the Elk, the Ccrvns niegaceros partakes of the Elk in its general proportions and in the form of its cranium, but it approaches the Fallow-deer in its size and in the disposition of its horns. These magnificent appendages, however, while they decorated the head of the animal and gave a most imposing appearance to it, must have sadly impeded its progress through the thick and tangled forests of the ancient world. The length of these horns was between nine and ten feet; and they were so divergent that, measured from one extremity to the other, they occupied a space of between three and four yards. The skeleton of the Cervtis megaceros is found in the deposits of calcareous tufa, which underlie the immense peat moss of Ireland; sometimes in the turf itself, as near the Curragh in Kildare; in which position they sometimes occur in little mounds piled up in a small space, and nearly always in the same attitude, the head aloft, the neck stretched out, the horns reversed and thrown downwards towards the back, as if the animal, suddenly immersed into marshy ground, had been under the necessity of throwing up its head in search of respirable air. In the Geological Cabinet of the Sorbonne, at Paris, there is a magnificent skeleton of Cervus megaceros; another belongs to the College of Surgeons in London; and there is a third at Vienna.

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