 CHAPTER VIII. IT'S SPECIES WHICH TOWER ABOVE THEIR FELLOWS, AS GLIATH OF GATH STOOD HEAD IN SHOLDERS ABOVE THE FILLISTINE HOSTS. And while some of these are giants only in comparison with their fellows, belonging to families whose members are short of stature, others are sufficiently great to be called giants under any circumstances. Some of these giants live today, some have but recently passed away, and some cease to be long ages before man trod this earth. The most gigantic of mammals, the whales, still survive, and the elephant of today suffers but little in comparison with the mammoth of yesterday. The monstrous dinosaurs, greatest of all reptiles, greatest, in fact, of all animals that have walked the earth, flourished thousands upon thousands of years ago. As for birds, some of the giants among them are still living. Some existed long geologic periods ago, and a few have so recently vanished from the scene that their memory still lingers amid the haze of tradition. The best known among these, as well as the most recent in point of time, are the Moas of New Zealand, first brought to notice by the reverend W. Colenso, later on Bishop of New Zealand, one of the many missionaries to whom science is under obligations. Early in 1838, Bishop Colenso, while on a missionary visit to the East Cape region, heard from the natives of Wayapu, tales of a monstrous bird called Moa, having the head of a man that inhabited the mountainside some 80 miles away. This mighty bird, the last of his race, was said to be attended by two equally huge lizards that kept guard while he slept, and on the approach of man wakened the Moa, who immediately rushed upon the intruders, and trampled them to death. None of the Maori's had seen this bird, but they had seen, and somewhat irreverently used for making parts of their fishing tackle, bones of its extinct relatives, and these bones they declared to be as large as those of an ox. About the same time another missionary, the reverend Richard Taylor, found a bone ascribed to the Moa, and met with a very similar tradition among the natives of a nearby district, only, as the foot of the rainbow moves away as we move toward it, in his case the bird was said to dwell in quite a different locality from that given by the natives of East Cape. While, however, the Maori's were certain that the Moa still lived, and to doubt its existence was little short of a crime, no one had actually seen it, and as time went on and the bird still remained unseen by any explorer, hope became doubt and doubt certainty, until it even became a mooted question whether such a bird had existed within the past 10 centuries to say nothing of having lived within the memory of man. But if we do not know the living birds, their remains are scattered, broadcast over hillside and plain, concealed in caves, buried in the mud of swamps, and from these we gain a good idea of their size and structure, while chance has even made it possible to know something of their color and general appearance. This chance was the discovery of a few specimens preserved in exceptionally dry caves on the South Island, which not only had some of the bones still united by ligaments, but patches of skin clinging to the bones, and bearing numerous feathers of a chestnut color tipped with white. These small, straggling, rusty feathers are not much to look at, but when we reflect that they have been preserved for centuries without any care whatever, while the buffalo bugs have devoured our best Smyrna rugs in spite of all possible precautions, our respect for them increases. From the bones we learn that there were a great many kinds of moas, twenty at least, ranging in size from those little larger than a turkey, to that giant among giants, dinornus maximus, which stood at least ten feet high, or two feet higher than the largest ostrich, and may well claim the distinction of being the tallest of all known birds. We also learn from the bones that not only were the moas flightless, but that many of them were absolutely wingless, being devoid even of such vestiges of wings as we find in the cassowary or aptarix. But if nature deprived these birds of wings, she made ample amens in the manner of legs, those of some species, the elephant-footed moa, Paciornus elephantopus, for example, being so massively built as to cause one to wonder what the owner used them for, although the generally accepted theory is that they were used for scratching up the roots of ferns on which the moas are believed to have fed. And if a blow from an irate ostrich is sufficient to fellaman, what must have been the kicking power of an able-bodied moa? Beside this bird, the ostrich would appear as slim and graceful as a gazelle beside a prize ox. Footnote. The height of the moas, and even of some species of apiornus, is often stated to be twelve or fourteen feet, but such a height can only be obtained by placing the skeleton in a wholly unnatural attitude. End of footnote. The moas were confined to New Zealand, some species inhabiting the North Island, some the South, very few being common to both, and from these peculiarities of distribution, geologists deduce that at some early period in the history of the Earth, the two islands formed one that later on the land subsided, leaving the island separated by a strait, and that since this subsidence there has been sufficient time for the development of the species peculiar to each island. Although moas were still numerous when man made his appearance in this part of the world, the large deposits of their bones indicate that they were on the wane, and that natural causes had already reduced the feathered population of these islands. A glacial period is believed to have wrought their destruction, and in one great morass, abounding in springs, their bones occur in such enormous numbers, layer upon layer, that it is thought the birds sought the place where the flowing springs might afford their feet at least some respite from the biting cold, and there perished miserably by thousands. What nature spared, man finished, and legends of moa hunts and moa feasts still lingered among the Maori's, when the white man came and began in turn the extermination of the Maori. The theory has been advanced with much to support it that the big birds were eaten off the face of the earth by an earlier race than the Maori's, and that after the extirpation of the moas the craving for flesh naturally led to cannibalism. But by whomsoever the destruction was wrought the result was the same, the habitat of these feathered giants knew them no longer, while multitudes of charred bones interspersed with fragments of eggshells bear testimony to former barbaric feasts. It is a far cry from New Zealand to Madagascar, but thither must we go, for that island was, pity we cannot say is, inhabited by a race of giant birds, from whose eggs it has been thought may have been hatched the rock of Sinbad. Arabian tales, as we all know, locate the rock either in Madagascar or in some adjacent island to the north and east, and it is far from unlikely that the legends of the Apiornes, backed by the substantial proof of its enormous eggs, may have been the slight foundation of fact whereon the storyteller erected his structure of fiction. True the rock of Fable was a gigantic bird of prey capable of bearing away an elephant in its talons, while the Apiornes has shed its wings and shrunk to dimensions little larger than an ostrich, but this is the inevitable result of closer acquaintance and the application of a two-foot rule. Like the Moa, the Apiornes seems to have lived in tradition long after it became extinct. For a French history of Madagascar, published as early as 1658, makes mention of a large bird or kind of ostrich said to inhabit the southern end of the island. Still, in spite of bones having been found that bare evident traces of the handiwork of man, it is possible that this and other reports were due to the obvious necessity of having some bird to account for the presence of the eggs. The actual introduction of the Apiornes to science took place in 1834, when a French traveller sent Jules Vero, the ornithologist, a sketch of a huge egg, saying that he had seen two of that size. One saw it entwined to make bowls, the other traversed by a stick, serving in the preparation of rice, uses somewhat in contrast with the proverbial fragility of eggshells. A little later another traveller procured some fragments of eggshells, but it was not until 1851 that any entire eggs were obtained, when two were secured, and with a few bones sent to France, where Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire bestowed upon them the name of Apiornes Maximus, the greatest lofty bird. Maximus the eggs remain, for they still hold the record for size, but so far as the bird that is supposed to have laid them is concerned, the name was a little premature, for other and larger species subsequently came to hand. Between the Apiornithes and the Moas, science has had a hard time, for the supply of big words was not large enough to go around, and some had to do duty twice. In the way of generic names we have Dynornis, Terrible Bird, Apiornes, High Bird, Paciornis, Stout Bird, and Brontornis, Thunderbird. While for specific names there are Robustus, Maximus, Titan, Gravis, Heavy, Iminus, Enormous, Crassus, Stout, Injuns, Great, and Elephantipus, Elephant Footed, truly a goodly array of large sounding words. But to return to the big eggs, usually we look upon those of the ostrich as pretty large, but an ostrich egg measures four and one half by six inches. While that of Apiornes is nine by 13 inches, or to put it another way, it would hold the contents of six ostrich's eggs, or 148 hen's eggs, or 30,000 hummingbird's eggs. And while this is very much smaller than a water butt, it is still as large as a bucket, and one or two such eggs might suffice to make an omelet for gargantua himself. The size of an egg is no safe criterion of the size of the bird that laid it, for a large bird may lay a small egg, or a small bird a large one. Comparing the egg of the Great Moa with that of our Apiornes, one might think the latter much the larger bird, say 12 feet in height, when the facts in the case are that while there was no great difference in the weight of the two, that difference, and a superiority of at least two feet in height, are in favor of the bird that laid the smaller egg. The record of large eggs, however, belongs to the Apteryx, a New Zealand bird smaller than a hen, though distantly related to the Moas, which lays an egg about one third of its own weight, measuring three by five inches. Perhaps it is not to be wondered at that the bird lays but two. Although most of the eggs of these big birds that have been found have literally been unearthed from the muck of swamps, now and then one comes to light in a more interesting manner, as, for example, when a perfect egg of Apiornes was found afloat after a hurricane, bobbing serenely up and down with the waves near St. Augustine's Bay, or when an egg of the Moa was exhumed from an ancient Maori grave, where for years it had lain unharmed, safely clasped between the skeleton fingers of the occupant. So far very few of these huge eggs have made their way to this country, and the only egg of Apiornes, now on this side of the water, is the property of a private individual. Most recent in point of discovery, but oldest in point of time, are the giant birds from Patagonia, which are burdened with the name of Fororacidae, a name that originated in an error, although the error may well be excused. The first fragment of one of these great birds to come to light was a portion of the lower jaw, and this was so massive, so un-bird-like, that the finder dubbed it Fororacus, and so it must remain. It is a pity that all the large names were used up before this group of birds was discovered, and it is particularly unfortunate that Dinornus, terrible bird, was applied to the root-eating Moas, for these Patagonian birds with their massive limbs, huge heads and hooked beaks, were truly worthy of such a name. And although, in no wise related to the eagles, they may inhabit have been terrestrial birds of prey. Not all the members of this family are giants, for as in other groups some are big and some little, but the largest among them might be styled the Daniel Lambert of the feathered race. Bront Ornus, for example, the thunderbird, or as the irreverent translate it, the thundering big bird, had leg bones larger than those of an ox, the drumstick measuring 30 inches in length by two-and-a-half inches in diameter, or four-and-one-fourth inches across the ends, while the tarsus, or lower bone of the leg, to which the toes are attached, was 16-and-one-half inches long and five-and-one-half inches wide where the toes join on. Bear this in mind the next time you see a large turkey, or compare these bones with those of an ostrich, but lest you may forget, it may be said that the same bone of a 14-pound turkey is five-and- one-and-a-half inches long and one inch wide at either end, while that of an ostrich measures 19 inches long and two inches across the toes, or three at the upper end. If Bront Ornus was a heavy-limbed bird, he was not without near rivals among the Moas, while the great Foro Rakis, one of his contemporaries, was not only nearly as large, but quite unique in build. Imagine a bird seven or eight feet in height, from the sole of his big sharp-clawed feet to the top of his huge head. Poise this head on a neck as thick as that of a horse, arm it with a beak as sharp as an ice pick, and almost as formidable, and you have a fair idea of this feathered giant of the ancient pompous. The head indeed was truly colossal for that of a bird, measuring 23 inches in length by seven in depth, while that of the race-horse Lexington, and he was a good-sized horse, measures 22 inches long by five and one-half inches deep. The depth of the jaw is omitted because we wish to make as good a case as possible for the bird, and the jaw of a horse is so deep as to give him an undue advantage in that respect. We can only speculate on the food of these great birds, and for ought we know to the contrary they may have caught fish, fed upon carrion, or used their powerful feet and huge beaks for grubbing roots. But if they were not more or less carnivorous, preying upon such reptiles, mammals, and other birds as came within reach, then nature apparently made a mistake in giving them such a formidable equipment of beak and claw. So far as habits go, we might be justified in calling them cursorial birds of prey. We really know very little about these Patagonian giants, but they are interesting not only from their great size and astounding skulls, but because of the early age, Myocene, at which they lived, and because in spite of their bulk, they are in no wise related to the ostriches, but belong near the Heron family. As usual, we have no idea why they became extinct, but in this instance man is guiltless, for they lived and died long before he made his appearance, and the ever-convenient hypothesis change of climate may be responsible for their disappearance. Something, perhaps, remains to be said concerning the causes which seem to have led to the development of these giant birds, as well as the reasons for their flightless condition and peculiar distribution, for it will be noticed that, with the exception of the African and South American ostriches, the great flightless birds as a rule are, and were, confined to uninhabited or sparsely populated islands, and this is equally true of the many small but equally flightless birds. It is a seemingly harsh law of nature that all living beings shall live in a more or less active struggle with each other and with their surroundings, and that those creatures which possess some slight advantage over their fellows in the matter of speed or strength or ability to adapt themselves to surrounding conditions shall prosper at the expense of the others. In the power of flight, birds have a great safeguard against changes of climate with their accompanying variations in the supply of food and to a lesser extent against their various enemies, including man. This power of flight, acquired early in their geological history, has enabled birds to spread over the length and breadth of the globe as no other group of animals has done, and to thrive under the most varying conditions, and it would seem that if this power were lost, it must sooner or later work harm. Now today we find no great wingless birds in thickly populated regions or were beasts of prey abound. The ostriches roam the desert wastes of Arabia, Africa, and South America, where men are few and savage beasts scarce, and against these is placed a fleetness of foot inherited from ancestors who acquired it before man was. The heavy cassowaries dwell in the thinly inhabited thickly wooded islands of Malaysia, where again there are no large carnivores, and where the dense vegetation is some safeguard against man. The emu comes from the Australian plains, where also there are no forefooted enemies, and where his ancestors dwelt in peace before the advent of man. Footnote The dingo or native dog is not forgotten, but like man it is a comparatively recent animal. End of footnote And the same things are true of the moas, the apiornathes, the flightless birds of Patagonia, the recent dodo of Mauritius, and the solitaire of Rodriguez, each and all of which flourished in places where there were no men and practically no other enemies. Hence we deduce that the absence of enemies is the prime factor in the existence of flightless birds, although presence of food is an essential, while isolation or restriction to a limited area plays an important part by keeping together those birds, or that race of birds whose members show a tendency to disuse their wings. Footnote Note that in Tasmania, which is very near Australia, both in space and in the character of its animals, there are two carnivorous mammals, the Tasmanian wolf and the Tasmanian devil, and no flightless birds. End of footnote It will be seen that such combinations of circumstances will most naturally be found on islands whose geological history is such that they have no connection with adjacent continents, or such a very ancient connection that they were not thinned peopled with beasts of prey, while subsequently their distance from other countries has prevented them from receiving such population by accident in recent times, and has also retarded the arrival of man. Once established, flightlessness and size play into one another's hands. The flightless bird has no limit placed on its size, while granted a food supply and immunity from man. The larger the bird, the less the necessity for wings to escape from four-footed foes. So long as the climate was favourable and man absent, the big clumsy bird might thrive, but upon the coming of man or in the face of any unfavourable change of climate, he would be at a serious disadvantage, and hence, whenever either of these two factors has been brought to bear against them, the feathered giants have vanished. Footnote While we do not know the limit of size to a flying creature, none has as yet been found whose wings would spread over twenty feet from tip to tip, and it is evident that wings larger than this would demand great strength for their manipulation. End of footnote. References There is a fine collection of mounted skeletons of various species of moas in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Cambridge, Massachusetts, and another in the American Museum of Natural History, New York. A few other skeletons and numerous bones are to be found in other institutions, but the author is not aware of any egg being in this country. Specimens of the Apioranists are rare in this country, but Mr. Robert Guilford of Orange, New Jersey is the possessor of a very fine egg. A number of eggs have been sold in London. The price is ranging from 200 pounds down to 42 pounds, this last being much less than prices paid for eggs of the Great Oak. But then the Great Oak is somewhat of a fad, and there are just enough eggs in existence to bring one into the market every little while. Besides, the number of eggs of the Great Oak is a fixed quantity, while no one knows how many more of Apioranists remain to be discovered in the swamps of Madagascar. No specimens of the gigantic Patagonian birds are now in this country, but a fine example of one of the smaller forms, Pelikornis, including the only breast bone yet found, is in the Museum of Princeton University. The largest known tibia of Amoa, the longest bird bone known, is in the collection of the Canterbury Museum Christchurch, New Zealand. It is three feet three inches long. This, however, is exceptional, the measurements of the leg bones of an ordinary dinornus maximus being as follows. Femur 18 inches, tibia 32 inches, tarsus 19 inches, a total of 5 feet 9 inches, the egg measures 10 and 1 half by 6 and 1 half inches. There is plenty of literature and very interesting literature about the Moas, but unfortunately the best of it is not always accessible, being contained in the New Zealand Journal of Science and the transactions of the New Zealand Institute. The volume of transactions for 1893, being volume 26, contains a very full list of articles relating to the Moas, compiled by Mr. A. Hamilton. It will be found to commence on page 229. There is a good article on Moa in Newton's Dictionary of Birds, a book that should be in every library. Chapter 9 of Animals of the Past by Frederick Lucas This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Jeffrey Smith. The Ancestry of the Horse Said the little E. O. Hippus, I am going to be a horse, and on my middle fingernails to run my earthly course. The American whose ancestors came over in the Mayflower has a proper pride in the length of the line of his descent. The Englishman, whose genealogical tree sprang up at the time of William the Conqueror, has, in its eight centuries of growth, still larger occasion for pluming himself on the antiquity of his family. But the pedigree of even the latter is a thing of yesterday when compared with that of the horse, whose family records, according to Professor Osborn, reach backward for something like two million years. And if, as we have been told, it is a good thing to have ancestors, but sometimes a little hard on the ancestor, in this instance at least the founders of the family have every reason to regard their descendants with undisguised pride. For the horse family started in life in a small way, and the first of the line, the Hierocotherium, was a little animal no bigger than a fox, and on five toes he scampered over tertiary rocks. In the age called Eocene, because it was the morning of life for the great group of mammals whose culminating point was man. Footnote. Four, to be exact, but we prefer to sacrifice the foot of the Hierocotherium rather than to take liberties with one of the feet of Mrs. Stetson's poem. End of footnote. At that time western North America was a country of many lakes, for the most part comparatively shallow, around the reedy margins of which moved a host of animals, quite unlike those of today, and yet foreshadowing them the forerunners of the rhinoceros, taper, and the horse. The early horse, we may call him so by courtesy, although he was then very far from being a true horse, was an insignificant little creature apparently far less likely to succeed in life's race than his bulky competitors, and yet by making the most of their opportunities his descendants have survived, while most of theirs have dropped by the wayside. And finally, by the aid of man, the horse has become spread over the length and breadth of the habitable globe. Now right here it may be asked, how do we know that the little Hierocotherium was the progenitor of the horse, and how can it be shown that there is any bond of kinship between him and, for example, the great French Pacheron. There is only one way in which we can obtain this knowledge, and but one method by which the relationship can be shown, and that is by collecting the fossil remains of animals long extinct, and comparing them with the bones of the recent horse, a branch of science known as paleontology. It has taken a very long time to gather the necessary evidence, and it has taken a vast amount of hard work in our western territories, for the country that is as hot as Hades, watered by stagnant alkali pools, is almost invariably the richest in fossils. Likewise it has called for the expenditure of much time and more patience to put together some of this petrified evidence, fragmentary in every sense of the word, and get it into such shape that it could be handled by the anatomist. Still the work has been done, and, link by link, the chain has been constructed that unites the horse of today with the horse of very many yesterdays. The very first links in this chain are the remains of the Bronze Age and those found among the ruins of the ancient Swiss lake dwellings. But earlier still than these are the bones of horses found abundantly in Northern Europe, Asia, and America. The individual bones and teeth of some of these horses are scarcely distinguishable from those of today, a fact noted in the name, equus fraternus, applied to one's species. And when teeth alone are found it is at times practically impossible to say whether they belong to a fossil horse or to a modern animal. But when enough scattered bones are gathered to make a fairly complete skeleton, it becomes evident that the fossil horse had a proportionately larger head and smaller feet than his existing relative, and that he was a little more like an ass or zebra. For the latter, spite of his gay coat, is a near relative of the lowly ass. Moreover, primitive man made sketches of the primitive horse, just as he did of the mammoth, and these indicate that the horse of those days was something like an overgrown Shetland pony, low and heavily built, large-headed and rough-coated. For the old cave dwellers of Europe were intimately acquainted with the prehistoric horses, using them for food as they did almost every animal that fell beneath their flint arrows and stone axes. And if one may judge from the abundance of bones, the horses must have roamed about in bands, just as the horses escaped from civilization roam, or have roamed over the pompous of South America and the prairies of the West. The horse was just as abundant in North America in Pleistocene time as in Europe. But there is no evidence to show that it was contemporary with early man in North America, and even were this the case, it is generally believed that long before the discovery of America the horse had disappeared, and yet so plentiful and so fresh are his remains, and so much like those of the Mustang that the late Professor Cope was want to say that it almost seemed as if the horse might have lingered in Texas until the coming of the white man. And Sir William Flower wrote, There is a possibility of the animal having still existed, in a wild state, in some parts of the continent, remote from that which was first visited by the Spaniards, where they were certainly unknown. It has been suggested that the horses which were found by Cabot in La Plata in 1530 cannot have been introduced. Still we have not the least little bit of positive proof that such was the case, and although the sight of many an ancient Indian village has been carefully explored, no bones of the horse have come to light, or if they have been found, bones of the ox or sheep were also present to tell that the village was occupied long after the advent of the whites. It is also a curious fact that within historic times there have been no wild horses in the true sense of the word, unless indeed those found on the steps north of the sea of Azoth be wild, and this is very doubtful. But long before the dawn of history the horse was domesticated in Europe, and Caesar found the Germans, and even the old Britons, using war chariots drawn by horses, for the first use man seems to have made of the horse, was to aid him in killing off his fellow man, and not until comparatively modern times was the animal employed in the peaceful arts of agriculture. The immediate predecessors of these horses were considerably smaller, being about the size and build of a pony, but they were very much like a horse in structure, save that the teeth were shorter. As they lived during Pliocene times they have been named Pliohippus. Going back into the past a step farther, though a pretty long step if we reckon by years, we come upon a number of animals very much like horses, save for certain cranial peculiarities, and the fact that they had three toes on each foot, while the horse, as everyone knows, has but one toe. Now if we glance at the skeleton of a horse, we will see on either side of the cannon bone, in the same situation as the upper part of the little toes of the hippotherium, as these three-toed horses are called, a long slender bone, termed by veterinarians, the splint bone. And it requires no anatomical training to see that the bones in the two animals are the same. The horse lacks the lower part of his side toes, that is all, just as man will very probably someday lack the last bones of his little toe. The horse lacks the lower part of his side toes, that is all, just as man will very probably someday lack the last bones of his little toe. We find an approach to this condition in some of the hippotheries even, known as proto-hippus, in which the side toes are quite small, foreshadowing the time when they shall have disappeared entirely. It may also be noted here that the splint bones of the horses of the Bronze Age are a little longer than those of existing horses, and that they are never united with the large central toe, while nowadays there is something of a tendency for the three bones to fuse into one, although part of this tendency the rider believes to be due to inflammation set up by the strain of the pulling and hauling the animal is now called upon to do. Some of these three-toed hippotheries are not in the direct line of ancestry of the horse, but our side branches on the family tree, having become so highly specialized in certain directions that no further progress horseward was possible. Backward still, and the bones we find in the myocene strata of the west, belonging to those ancestors of the horse to which the name of mezzo-hippus has been given, because their midway in time and structure between the horse of the past and present tell us that then all horses were small and that all had three toes on a foot, while the forefeet bore even the suggestion of a fourth toe. From this to our eocene hierocother with four toes is only another long time step. We may go even beyond this in time and structure, and carry back the line of the horse to animals which only remotely resembled him, and had five good toes to a foot. But while these contained the possibility of a horse, they made no show of it. Increase in size and decrease in number of the toes were not the only changes that were required to transform the progeny of the hierocother into a horse. These are the most evident, but the increased complexity in the structure of the teeth was quite as important. The teeth of gnawing animals have often been compared to a chisel which is made of a steel plate with soft iron backing, and the teeth of a horse or of other grass-eating animals are simply an elaboration of this idea. The hard enamel which represents the steel is set in soft dintene which represents the iron, and in use the dintene wears away the faster of the two, so that the enamel stands up in ridges, each tooth becoming, as it is correctly termed, a grinder. In a horse the plates of enamel form curved complex irregular patterns, but as we go back in time the patterns become less and less elaborate, until in the hierocother standing at the foot of the family tree the teeth are very simple in structure. Moreover his teeth were of limited growth while those of the horse grow for a considerable time, thus compensating for the wear to which they are subjected. We have then this direct evidence as to the genealogy of the horse, that between the little eocene hierocother and the modern horse we can place a series of animals by which we can pass by gradual stages from one to the other, and that as we come upward there is an increase in stature in the complexity of the teeth and in the size of the brain. At the same time the number of toes decreases, which tells that the animals were developing more and more speed, for it is a rule that the fewer the toes the faster the animal. The fastest of birds, the ostrich, has but two toes and one of these is mostly ornamental, and the fastest of mammals, the horse, has but one. All breeders of fancy stock, particularly of pigeons and poultry, recognize the tendency of animals to revert to the forms whence they were derived and reproduce some character of a distant ancestor, to throw back as the breeders term it. If now instead of reproducing a trade or feature possessed by some ancestor a score, a hundred, or perhaps a thousand years ago, there should reappear a characteristic of some ancestor that flourished one hundred thousand years back. We should have a seeming abnormality, but really a case of reversion. And the more we become acquainted with the structure of extinct animals and the development of those now living, the better able we are to explain these apparent abnormalities. Bearing in mind that the two splint bones of the horse correspond to the upper portions of the side toes of the hippotharium and mesohippus, it is easy to see that if for any reason these should develop into toes they would make the foot of a modern horse appear like that of his distant ancestor. While such a thing rarely happens, yet now and then nature apparently does attempt to reproduce a horse's foot after the ancient pattern, for occasionally we meet with a horse having, instead of the single toe with which the average horse is satisfied, one or possibly two extra toes. Sometimes the toe is extra in every sense of the word, being a mere duplication of the central toe, but sometimes it is an actual development of one of the splint bones. No less a personage than Julius Caesar possessed one of these polydactyl horses. In the reporters of the Daily Roman and the Tiberian Gazette, doubtless wrote it up in good journalistic Latin, for we find the horse described as having feet that were almost human and as being looked upon with great awe. While this is the most celebrated of extra-toed horses, other and more plebeian individuals have been much more widely known through having been exhibited throughout the country under such titles as click, the horse with six feet, the eight-footed Cuban horse, and so on, and possibly some of these are familiar to readers of this page. So the collateral evidence, though scanty, bears out the circumstantial proof, derived from fossil bones that the horse has developed from a many-toed ancestor, and the evidence points toward the little hierocothyre as being that ancestor. It remains only to show some good reason why this development should have taken place, or to indicate the forces by which it was brought about. We have heard much about the survival of the fittest, a phrase which simply means that those animals best adapted to their surroundings will survive, while those ill-adapted will perish. But it should be added that it means also that the animals must be able to adapt themselves to changes in their environment, or to change with it. Living beings cannot stand still indefinitely, they must progress or perish, and this seems to have been the cause for the extinction of the huge quadrupeds that flourished at the time of the three-toed Miocene horse. They were adapted to their environment as it was, but when the western mountains were thrust upward, cutting off the moist winds from the Pacific, making great changes in the rainfall and climate to the eastward of the rocky mountains, these big beasts, slow of foot and dull of brain, could not keep pace with the change, and their race vanished from the face of the earth. The day of the little hierocothyre was at the beginning of the great series of changes by which the Lake Country of the West, with its marshy flats and rank vegetation, became transformed into dry uplands, sparsely clad with fine grasses. On these dry plains, the more nimble-footed animals would have the advantage in the struggle for existence, and while the four-toed foot would keep its owner from sinking in soft ground, he was handicapped when it became a question of speed, for not only is a fleet animal better able to flee from danger than his slower fellows, but in time of drought he can cover the greater extent of territory in search of food or water. So, too, as the rank rushes gave place to fine grasses, often browned and withered beneath the summer's sun, the complex tooth had an advantage over that of simpler structure, while the cutting teeth, so completely developed in the horse family, enabled their possessors to crop the grass as closely as one could do it with scissors. Likewise, up to a certain point, the largest most powerful animal will not only conquer or escape from his enemies, but prevail over rivals of his own kind as well, and thus it came to pass that those early members of the horse family who were preeminent in speed and stature, and harmonized best with their surroundings, outstripped their fellows and transmitted these qualities to their progeny, until, as a result of long ages of natural selection, there was developed the modern horse. The rest, man has done. The heavy, slow-paced dre horse, the fleet trotter, the huge percheron, and the diminutive pony are one and all the recent products of artificial selection. References. The best collection of fossil horses, and one specially arranged to illustrate the line of descent of the modern horse, is to be found in the American Museum of Natural History, New York, but some good specimens of particular interest because they were described by Professor Marsh, and studied by Huxley, are in the Yale University Museum. They are referred to in Huxley's American Addresses, Lectures on Evolution. The Horse by Sir W. H. Flower discusses the horse in a popular manner from various points of view, and contains numerous references to books and articles on the subject from which anyone wishing for further information could obtain it. End of Chapter 9. Chapter 10 of Animals of the Past by Frederick Lucas. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Jeffrey Smith. The mammoth. His legs were as thick as the bowl of the beach, his tusks as the button-wood white, while his lithe trunk wound like a sapling around an oak in the whirlwind's mite. In the October number of McClure's magazine for 1899 was published a short story, The Killing of the Mammoth by H. Tucumann, which to the amazement of the editors was taken by many readers, not as fiction, but as a contribution to natural history. Immediately after the appearance of that number of the magazine, the authorities of the Smithsonian Institution, in which the author had located the remains of the beast of his fancy, were beset with visitors to see the stuffed mammoth, and the Daily Mail of the magazine, as well as that of the Smithsonian Institution, was filled with inquiries for more information, and for requests to settle wagers as to whether it was a true story or not. The contribution in question was printed purely as fiction, with no idea of misleading the public, and was entitled a story in the table of contents. We doubt if any writer of realistic fiction ever had a more general and convincing proof of success. About three centuries ago, in 1696, a Russian, one Ludloff by name, described some bones belonging to what the Tartars called Mamantu. Later on, Blumenbach pressed the common name into scientific use as Mamut, and Cuvier galicized this into Mamuth, whence by an easy transition we get our familiar mammoth. We are so accustomed to use the word to describe anything of remarkable size that it would be only natural to suppose that the name mammoth was given to the extinct elephant because of its extraordinary bulk. Exactly the reverse of this is true, however, for the word came to have its present meaning because the original possessor of the name was a huge animal. The Siberian peasants called the creature Mamantu, or ground-dweller, because they believed it to be a gigantic mole, passing its life beneath the ground, and perishing when, by any accident, it saw the light. The reasoning that led to this belief was very simple and the logic very good. No one had ever seen a live Mamantu, but there were plenty of its bones lying at or near the surface. Consequently, if the animal did not live above the ground, it must dwell below. Today, nearly everyone knows that the mammoth was a sort of big hairy elephant, now extinct, and nearly everyone has a general idea that it lived in the north. There is some uncertainty as to whether the mammoth was a mastodon or the mastodon a mammoth, and there is a great deal of misconception as to the size and abundance of this big beast. It may be said in passing that the mastodon is only a second or third cousin of the mammoth, but that the existing elephant of Asia is a very near relative, certainly as near as a first cousin, possibly a very great grandson. Popularly, the mammoth is supposed to have been a colossus somewhere from 12 to 20 feet in height, beside whom modern elephants would seem insignificant. But as trout lose much in dressing, so mammoths shrink in measuring, and while there were doubtless jumbos among them in the way of individuals of exceptional magnitude, the majority were decidedly under jumbo's size. The only mounted mammoth skeleton in this country, that in the Chicago Academy of Sciences, is one of the largest, the thigh bone measuring five feet one inch in length, or a foot more than that of jumbo. And as jumbo stood 11 feet high, the rule of three applied to this thigh bone would give the living animal a height of 13 feet eight inches. The height of this specimen is given as 13 feet in its bones, with an estimate of 14 feet in its clothes. But as the skeleton is obviously mounted altogether too high, it is pretty safe to say that 13 feet is a good fair allowance for the height of this animal when alive. As for the majority of mammoths, they would not average more than nine or ten feet high. Sir Samuel Baker tells us that he has seen plenty of wild African elephants that would exceed jumbo by a foot or more, and while this must be accepted with caution, since unfortunately he neglected to put a tape line on them, yet Mr. Thomas Baines did measure a specimen 12 feet high. This coupled with Sir Samuel's statement indicates that there is not so much difference between the mammoth and the elephant as there might be. This applies to the mammoth par excellence, the species known scientifically as Elephus primogenius, whose remains are found in many parts of the northern hemisphere and occur abundantly in Siberia and Alaska. There were other elephants than the mammoth and some that exceeded him in size, notably Elephus meridionalis of southern Europe and Elephus columbi of our southern and western states, but even the largest cannot positively be asserted to have exceeded a height of 13 feet. Tusks offer convenient terms of comparison, and those of an average fully grown mammoth are from 8 to 10 feet in length. Those of the famous St. Petersburg specimen and those of the huge specimen in Chicago measuring respectively 9 feet 3 inches and 9 feet 8 inches. So far as the rider is aware, the largest tusks actually measured are two from Alaska, one 12 feet 10 inches long, weighing 190 pounds, reported by Mr. J. Beach, and another 11 feet long, weighing 200 pounds, noted by Mr. T. L. Brevig. Compared with these, we have the big tusk that used to stand on Fulton Street, New York, just an inch under 9 feet long and weighing 184 pounds, or the largest shown at Chicago in 1893, which was 7 feet 6 inches long and weighed 176 pounds. The largest most beautiful tusks probably ever seen in this country were a pair brought from Zanzibar and displayed by Messers Tiffany and Company in 1900. The measurements and weights of these were as follows. Length along outer curve 10 feet and 3 fourths of an inch. Circumference 1 foot 11 inches. Weight 224 pounds. Length along outer curve 10 feet 3 and 1 half inches. Circumference 2 feet and 1 fourth of an inch. Weight 239 pounds. For our knowledge of the external appearance of the mammoth, we are indebted to the more or less entire examples which have been found at various times in Siberia, but mainly to the noted specimen found in 1799 near the Lena, embedded in the ice where it had been reposing, so geologists tell us, anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 years. How the creature gradually thawed out of its icy tomb and the tusks were taken by the discover and sold for ivory. How the dogs fed upon the flesh in summer while bears and wolves feasted upon it in winter. How the animal was within an ace of being utterly lost to science when, at the last moment, the mutilated remains were rescued by Mr. Adams is an old story, often told and retold. Suffice it to say that besides the bones enough of the beast was preserved to tell us exactly what was the covering of this ancient elephant, and to show that it was a creature adapted to withstand the northern cold and fitted for living on the branches of the birch and hemlock. The exact birthplace of the mammoth is as uncertain as that of many other great characters, but his earliest known resting place is in the Kroemer forest beds of England, a country inhabited by him at a time when the German ocean was dry land and great Britain part of a peninsula. Here his remains are found today, while from the depths of the North Sea the hardy trawlers have dredged hundreds, a thousands of mammoth teeth in company with souls and turbot. If then the mammoth originated in western Europe and not in that great graveyard of fossil elephants northern India, eastward he went spreading over all Europe north of the Pyrenees and Alps, save only Scandinavia, whose glaciers offered no attractions, scattering his bones abundantly by the wayside to serve as marvels for future ages. Strange indeed have been some of the tales to which these and other elephantine remains have given rise when they came to light, in the good old days when knowledge of anatomy was small and credulity was great. The least absurd theory concerning them was that they were the bones of the elephants which Hannibal brought from Africa. Occasionally they were brought forward as irrefutable evidences of the deluge, but usually they figured as the bones of giants, the most famous of them being known as Tutobacus, king of the Simbri, a lusty warrior said to have had a height of 19 feet. Somewhat smaller but still of respectable height, 14 feet, was little John of Scotland, whereof Hector Bowies wrote concluding in a moralizing tone, be quick which it appears how extravagant and squire people grew in our region, afore they were effeminate with lust and intemperance of mouth. More than this these bones have been venerated in Greece and Rome as the remains of pagan heroes, and later on worshiped as relics of Christian saints. Did not the Church of Valencia possess an elephant tooth which did duty as that of Saint Christopher and, so late as 1789, was not a thigh bone figuring as the arm bone of a saint carried in procession through the streets in order to bring rain. Out of Europe, eastward into Asia, the mammoth took his way and having peopled that vast region took advantage of a land connection then existing between Asia and North America, and walked over into Alaska in company with the forerunners of the bison and the ancestors of the mountain sheep and Alaskan brown bear. Still eastward and southward he went until he came to the Atlantic coast, the latitude of southern New York roughly marking the southern boundary of the broad domain over which the mammoth roamed undisturbed. Footnote. This must be taken as a very general statement as the distinction between and habitats of Elephus primigenius and Elephus columbi, the southern mammoth, are not satisfactorily determined. Moreover, the two species overlap through a wide area of the west and northwest. End of footnote. Not that of necessity, all this vast area was occupied at one time, but this was the range of the mammoth during Pleistocene time, for over all this region his bones and teeth are found in greater or less abundance and in varying conditions of preservation. In regions like parts of Siberia and Alaska where the bones are entombed in a wet and cold often icy soil, the bones and tusks are almost as perfectly preserved as though they had been deposited but a score of years ago, while remains so situated that they have been subjected to varying conditions of dryness and moisture are always in a fragmentary state. As previously noted, several more or less entire carcasses of the mammoth have been discovered in Siberia only to be lost. And while no entire animal has so far been found in Alaska, someday one may yet come to light. That there is some possibility of this is shown by the discovery recorded by Mr. Dowl of the partial skeleton of a mammoth in the bank of the Yukon with some of the fat still present, and although this had been partially converted into adiposear, it was fresh enough to be used by the natives for greasing not their boots, but their boats. And up to the present time this is the nearest approach to finding a live mammoth in Alaska. As to why the mammoth became extinct, we know absolutely nothing, although various theories, some much more ingenious than plausible, have been advanced to account for their extermination. They perished of starvation, they were overtaken by floods on their supposed migrations, and drowned in detachments. They fell through the ice, equally in detachments, and were swept out to sea. But all we can safely say is that long ages ago the last one perished off the face of the earth. Strange it is, too, that these mighty beasts whose bulk was ample to protect them against four-footed foes, and whose woolly coat was proof against the cold, should have utterly vanished. They ranged from England eastward to New York, almost around the world, from the Alps to the Arctic Ocean, and in such numbers that today their tusks are articles of commerce, and fossil ivory has its price current as well as wheat. Mr. Boyd Dawkins thinks that the mammoth was actually exterminated by early man, but even granting that this might be true for southern and western Europe, it could not be true of the herds that inhabited the wastes of Siberia, or of the thousands that flourished in Alaska and the western United States. So far as man is concerned, the mammoth might still be living in these localities, where, before the discovery of gold drew thousands of miners to Alaska, there were vast stretches of wilderness wholly untrotted by the foot of man. Neither could this theory account for the disappearance of the mastodon from North America, where that animal covered so vast a stretch of territory that man, unaided by nature, could have made little impression on its numbers. That many were swept out to sea by the flooded rivers of Siberia is certain, for some of the low islands off the coast are said to be formed of sand, ice, and bones of the mammoth, and since four hundreds of years have come the tusks which are sold in the market beside those of the African and Indian elephants. That man was contemporary with the mammoth in southern Europe is fairly certain, for not only are the remains of the mammoth and man's flint weapons found together, but in a few instances some primeval land seer graved on slate, ivory, or reindeer, antler, a sketchy outline of the beast, somewhat impressionistic perhaps, but still, like the work of a true artist, preserving the salient features. We see the curved tusks, the snaky trunk, and the shaggy coat that we know belong to the mammoth, and we may feel assured that if early man did not conquer the clumsy creature with fire and flint, he yet gazed upon him from the safe vantage point of some lofty tree or inaccessible rock, and then went home to tell his wife and neighbors how the animal escaped because his bow missed fire. That man and mammoth lived together in North America is uncertain. So far there is no evidence to show that they did, although the absence of such evidence is no proof that they did not. That any live mammoth has for centuries been seen on the Alaskan tundras is utterly improbable, and on Mr. C.H. Townsend seems to rest the responsibility of having, though quite unintentionally, introduced the Alaskan live mammoth into the columns of the daily press. It befell in this wise. Among the very duties of our revenue marine is that of patrolling and exploring the shores of Arctic Alaska and the waters of the adjoining sea, and it is not so many years ago that the cutter Corwin, if memory serves a right, held the record of farthest north on the Pacific side. On one of these northern trips to the Kotsubu Sound region, famous for the abundance of its deposits of mammoth bones, the Corwin carried Mr. Townsend, then naturalist to the United States Fish Commission. At Cape Prince of Wales, some natives came on board, bringing a few bones and tusks of the mammoth, and upon being questioned as to whether or not any of the animals to which they pertained were living, promptly replied that all were dead, inquiring in turn if the white men had ever seen any, and if they knew how these animals so vastly larger than a reindeer looked. Footnote. Elephant point at the mouth of the Buckland River is so named from the numbers of mammoth bones which have accumulated there. End of footnote. Fortunately or unfortunately, there was on board a textbook of geology containing the well-known cut of the St. Petersburg mammoth, and this was brought forth greatly to the edification of the natives who were delighted at recognizing the curved tusks and the bones they knew so well. Next, the natives wished to know what the outside of the creature looked like, and as Mr. Townsend had been at Ward's establishment in Rochester when the first copy of the Stuttgart restoration was made, he rose to the emergency, and made a sketch. This was taken ashore together with a copy of the Cut of the Skeleton that was laboriously made by an Inuit sprawled out at full length on the deck. Now the Inuits, as Mr. Townsend tells us, are great Gatabots making long-sledge journeys in winter and equally long trips by boat in summer, while each season they hold a regular fair on Kotsebu Sound where a thousand or two natives gather to barter and gossip. On these journeys and at these gatherings, the sketches were no doubt passed about, copied and recopied, until a large number of Inuits had become well acquainted with the appearance of a mammoth, a knowledge that naturally they were well pleased to display to any white visitors. Also, like the Selt, the Alaskan native delights to give a soft answer, and is always ready to furnish the kind of information desired. Thus in due time the newspaper man learned that the Alaskans could make pictures of the mammoth and that they had some knowledge of its size and habits. So with inference and logic, quite as good as that of the Tungusian peasant, the reporter came to the conclusion that somewhere in the frozen wilderness the last survivor of the mammoths must still be at large. And so, starting on the Pacific coast, the live mammoth story wandered from paper to paper until it had spread throughout the length and breadth of the United States, when it was captured by Mr. Tukamen, who, with much artistic color and some realistic touches, transferred it to McClure's magazine, and unfortunately for the officials thereof, to the Smithsonian Institution. And now, once for all, it may be said that there is no mounted mammoth to awe the visitor to the national collections or to any other. And yet there seems no good and conclusive reason why there should not be. True, there are no live mammoths to be had at any price. Neither are their carcasses to be had on demand. Still, there is good reason to believe that a much smaller sum than that said to have been paid by Mr. Konradie for the mammoth, which is not in the Smithsonian Institution, would place one there. Footnote. Since these lines were written, another fine example of the mammoth has been discovered in Siberia, and even now, October 1901, an expedition is on its way to secure the skin and skeleton for the Academy of Natural Sciences at St. Petersburg. End of footnote. It probably could not be done in one year. It might not be possible in five years. But should any man of means wish to secure enduring fame by showing the world the mammoth as it stood in life a hundred centuries ago, before the dawn of even tradition, he could probably accomplish the result by the expenditure of a far less sum than it would cost to participate in an international yacht race. References. The mounted skeleton of the mammoth in the Museum of the Chicago Academy of Science is still the only one on exhibition in the United States. This specimen is probably the southern mammoth, elifas columbi, a species or race characterized by its great size and the coarse structure of the teeth. Remains of the mammoth are common enough, but save in Alaska, they are usually in a poor state of preservation or consist of isolated bones or teeth. A great many skeletons of mammoth have been found by gold miners in Alaska, and with proper care some of these could undoubtedly have been secured. Naturally, however, the miners do not feel like taking the time and trouble to exhume bones whose value is uncertain, while the cost of transportation precludes the bringing out of many specimens. Some reports of mammoths have been based on the bones of whales, including a skull that was figured in the daily papers. Almost every museum has on exhibition teeth of the mammoth, and there is a skull, though from a small individual, of the southern mammoth in the American Museum of Natural History, New York. The tusk obtained by Mr. Beech and mentioned in the text still holds the record for mammoth tusks. The greatest development of tusks occurred in Elifas, Ganesa, a species found in Pliocene deposits of the Cy Wallach Hills, India. This species appears not to have exceeded the existing elephant in bulk, but the tusks are 12 feet 9 inches long and 2 feet 2 inches in circumference. How the animal ever carried them is a mystery, both on account of their size and their enormous leverage. As for teeth, an upper grinder of Elifas, Colombia in the United States National Museum is 10 and 1 half inches high, 9 inches wide, the grinding face being 8 by 5 inches. This tooth, which is unusually perfect, retaining the outer covering of cement, came from Afton, Indian territory and weighs a little over 15 pounds. The lower tooth, shown in figure 38, is 12 inches long and the grinding face is 9 by 3 and 1 half inches. This is also from Elifas, Colombia. Grinders of the northern mammoth are smaller and the plates of enamel thinner and closer to one another. Mr. F. E. Andrews of Gunsight, Texas reports having found a femur or thigh bone, 5 feet 4 inches long and a humerus measuring 4 feet 3 inches, these being the largest bones on record indicating an animal 14 feet high. There is a vast amount of literature relating to the mammoth, some of it very untrustworthy. A list of all discoveries of specimens in the flesh is given by Norton Skihold in The Voyage of the Vega and The Mammoth and the Flood by Sir Henry Howard is a mine of information. Mr. Townsend's Alaska live mammoth story may be found in Forest and Stream for August 14, 1897. End of Chapter 10, Chapter 11 of Animals of the Past by Frederick Lucas. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Jeffrey Smith. The Mastodon. Who shall place a limit to the giant's unchained strength? The name Mastodon is given to a number of species of fossil elephants differing from the true elephants of which the mammoth is an example in the structure of the teeth. In the Mastodon's, the crown or grinding face of the tooth is formed by more or less regular cone-shaped cross ridges covered with enamel. While in the elephants, the enamel takes the form of narrow pocket-shaped plates set upright in the body of the tooth. Moreover, in the Mastodon's, the roots of the teeth are long prongs, while in the elephants, the roots are small and irregular. A glance at the cuts will show these distinctions better than they can be explained by words. Back in the past, however, we meet, as we should if there is any truth in the theory of evolution with elephants having an intermediate pattern of teeth. There is usually, or at least often, another point of difference between elephants and Mastodon's, for many of the latter not only had tusks in the upper, but in the lower jaw, and these are never found in any of the true elephants. The lower tusks are longer and larger in the earlier species of Mastodon than in those of more recent age, and in the latest species, the common American Mastodon, the little lower tusks were usually shed early in life. These afford some hints of the relationships of the Mastodon, for in Europe are found remains of a huge beast well-called dinotharium, or terrible animal, which possessed lower tusks only, and these, instead of sticking out from the jaw, are bent directly downwards. No perfect skull of this creature has yet been found, but it is believed to have had a short trunk. For a long time nothing but the skull was known, and some naturalists thought the animal to have been a gigantic manatee, or sea cow, and that the tusks were used for tearing food from the bottom of rivers, and for anchoring the animal to the bank, just as the walrus uses his tusks for digging clams, and climbing out upon the ice. In the first restorations of dinotharium, it is represented lying amidst reeds, the feet concealed from view, the head alone visible, but now it is pictured as standing erect for the discovery of massive leg bones has definitely settled the question as to whether it did or did not have limbs. There is another hint of relationship in the upper tusks of the earlier Mastodons, and this is the presence of a band of enamel running down each tusk. In all gnawing animals, the front cutting teeth are formed of soft denteen, or ivory, faced with a plate of enamel, just as the blade of a chisel or plane is formed of a plate of tempered steel, backed with soft iron. The object of this being the same in both tooth and chisel to keep the edge sharp by wearing away the softer material. In the case of the chisel, this is done by a man with a grindstone, but with the tooth it is performed automatically and more pleasantly by the gnawing of food. In the mastodon and elephant, the tusks, which are the representatives of the cutting teeth of rodents, are wide apart, and of course do not gnaw anything, but the presence of these enamel bands, hence at a time when they and their owner were smaller and differently shaped, and the teeth were used for cutting. Thus, great though the disparity of size may be, there is a suggestion that through the mastodon, the elephant is distantly related to the mouse, and that could we trace their respective pedigrees far enough, we might find a common ancestor. This presence of structures that are apparently of no use, often worse than useless, is regarded as the survival of characters that once serve some good purpose, like the familiar buttons on the sleeve, or at the back of a man's coat, or the bows and ruffles on a woman's dress. We are told that these are put on to make the dress look pretty, but the student regards the bows as vestiges of the time when there were no buttons and hooks and eyes had not been invented, and dresses were tied together with strings or ribbons. As for ruffles, they took the place of flounces, and flounces are vestiges of the time when a young woman wore the greater part of her wardrobe on her back, putting on one dress above another, the bottoms of the skirts showing like so many flounces. So buttons, ruffles, and the verma form appendix of which we hear so much all fall in the category of vestigial structures. Where the mastodons originated, we know not. Senor Amegino thinks their ancestors are to be found in Patagonia, and he is very probably wrong. Professor Cope thought they came from Asia, and he is probably right. Or they may have immigrated from the convenient Antarctica, which is called up to account for various facts in the distribution of animals. Footnote During the past year, 1901, Mr. C. W. Andrews of the British Museum has discovered in Egypt a small and primitive species of mastodon, also the remains of another animal which he thinks may be the long-sought ancestor of the elephant family which includes the mammoth and mastodon. End of Footnote Neither do we at present know just how many species of mastodons there may have been in the Western Hemisphere, for most of them are known from scattered teeth, single jaws, and odd bones, so that we cannot tell just what differences may be due to sex or individual variation. It is certain, however, that several distinct kinds or species have inhabited various parts of North America while remains of others occur in South America. The mastodon, however, the one most recent in point of time, and the best known because its remains are scattered far and wide over pretty much the length and breadth of the United States and are found also in Southern and Western Canada is the well-named mastodon Americanus, and unless otherwise specified, this alone will be meant when the name mastodon is used. Footnote This has also been called Gigantius and Ohioticus, but the name Americanus claims priority and should therefore be used. End of Footnote In some localities the mastodon seems to have abounded, but between the Hudson and Connecticut rivers indications of its former presence are rare and east of that they are practically wanting. The best preserve specimens come from Ulster and Orange Counties, New York, for these seem to have furnished the animal with the best facilities for getting mired. Just west of the Catskills, parallel with the Valley of the Hudson, is a series of meadows, bogs, and pools marking the sites of swamps that came into existence after the recession of the mighty ice sheet that long covered eastern North America, and in these many a mastodon seeking for food or water or merely wallowing in the mud stuck fast and perished miserably. And here today the spade of the farmer, as he sinks a ditch to drain what is left of some beaver pond of bygone days, strikes some bone as brown and rugged as a root, so like a piece of water-soaked wood that nine times out of ten it is taken for a fragment of tree trunk. The first notice of the mastodon in North America goes back to 1712, and is found in a letter from Cotton Mather to Dr. Woodward, written at Boston on November 17th, in which he speaks of a large work in manuscript entitled Biblia Americana, and gives as a sample a note on the passage in Genesis, chapter 6 verse 4, in which we read that there were giants in the earth in those days. We are told that this is confirmed by the bones and teeth of some large animal found lately in Albany in New England, which for some reason he thinks to be human, particularly a tooth brought from the place where it was found, to New York in 1705, being a very large grinder weighing four pounds and three quarters, with a bone supposed to be a thigh bone 17 feet long, the total length of the body being taken as 75 feet. Thus bones of the mastodon as well as those of the mammoth have done duty as those of giants. And as the first mastodon remains recorded from North America came from the region west of the Hudson, so the first fairly complete skeleton also came from that locality, secured at a very considerable outlay of money, and a still more considerable expenditure of labor by the exertions of CW Peel. This specimen was described at some length by Rembrandt Peel in a privately printed pamphlet, now unfortunately rare, and described in some respects better than has been done by any subsequent writer since the points of difference between various parts of the mastodon and elephant were clearly pointed out. This skeleton was exhibited in London and afterwards at Peel's Museum in Philadelphia, where with much other valuable material it was destroyed by fire. Struck by the evident crushing power of the great ridged molars, Peel was led to believe that the mastodon was a creature of carnivorous habits, and so described it, but this error is excusable. The more that to this day, when the mastodon is well known, and its description published time and again in the daily papers, finders of the teeth often consider them as belonging to some huge beast of prey. Since the time of Peel, several fine specimens have been taken from Ulster and Orange counties, among them the well-known Warren mastodon, and there is not the slightest doubt that many more will be recovered from the meadows, swamps, and pond-holes of these two counties. The next mastodon to appear on the scene was the so-called mazurium of Albert Koch, which he constructed somewhat as he did the hydrarchus of several individuals pieced together, thus forming a skeleton that was a monster in more ways than one. To heighten the effect, the curved tusks were so placed that they stood out at right angles to the sides of the head, like the swords upon the axles of ancient war chariots. Like Peel's specimen, this was exhibited in London, and there it still remains, for stripped of its superfluous bones and remounted, it may now be seen in the British Museum. Many a mastodon has come to light since the time of Koch, for while it is commonly supposed that remains of the animal are great rarities, as a matter of fact, they are quite common, and it may safely be said that during the seasons of ditching, draining, and well-digging, not a week passes without one or more mastodons being unearthed. Not that these are complete skeletons, very far from it, the majority of finds are scattered teeth, crumbling tusks, or massive leg bones, but still the mastodon is far commoner in the museums of this country than is the African elephant, for at the present date there are eleven of the former to one of the latter, the single skeleton of African elephant being that of Jumbo in the American Museum of Natural History. If one may judge by the abundance of bones, mastodons must have been very numerous in some favored localities, such as parts of Michigan, Florida, and Missouri, and about big bone lick, Kentucky. Perhaps the most noteworthy of all deposits is that at Kimswick, about 20 miles south of St. Louis, where, in a limited area, Mr. L. W. Beeler has exhumed bones representing several hundred individuals, varying in size from a mere baby mastodon up to the great tusker whose worn out teeth proclaim that he had reached the limit of even mastodonic old age. The spot where this remarkable deposit was found is at the foot of a bluff near the junction of two little streams, and it seems probable that in the days when these were larger, the spring floods swept down the bodies of animals that had perished during the winter to ground in an eddy beneath the bluff. Or as the place abounds in springs of sulfur and saltwater, it may be that this was where the animals assembled during cold weather, just as the Moas are believed to have gathered in the swamps of New Zealand, and here the weaker died and left their bones. The mastodon must have looked very much like any other elephant, though a little shorter in the legs and somewhat more heavily built than either of the living species, while the head was a trifle flatter and the jaw decidedly longer. The tusks are a variable quantity, sometimes merely bowing outwards, often curving upwards to form a half-circle. They were never so long as the largest mammoth tusks, but to make up for this they were a shade stouter for their length. As the mastodon ranged well to the north, it is fair to suppose that he may have been covered with long hair, a supposition that seems to be borne out by the discovery, noted by Rembrandt Peel, of a mass of long coarse woolly hair buried in one of the swamps of Ulster County, New York. And with these facts in mind, aided by photographs of various skeletons of mastodons, Mr. Gleason made the restoration, which accompanies this chapter. As for the size of the mastodon, this, like that of the mammoth, is popularly much overestimated, and it is more than doubtful if any attained the height of a full grown African elephant. The largest femur, or thigh bone, that has come under the writer's notice, was one he measured as it lay in the earth at Kimswick, and this was just four feet long, three inches shorter than the thigh bone of Jumbo. Several of the largest thigh bones measured show so striking and unanimity in size, between 46 and 47 inches in length, that we may be pretty sure they represent the average old bull mastodon, and if we say that these animals stood 10 feet high, we are probably doing them full justice. An occasional tusk reaches a length of 10 feet, but seven or eight is the usual size with a diameter of as many inches, and this is no larger than the tusks of the African elephant would grow if they had a chance. It is painful to be obliged to scale down the mastodon as we have just done the mammoth, but if any reader knows of specimens larger than those noted, he should by all means publish their measurements. Footnote As skeletons are sometimes mounted, they stand a full foot or more higher at the shoulders than the animals stood in life, this being caused by raising the body until the shoulder blades are far below the tips of the vertebrae, a position they never assume in life. End of footnote The disappearance of the mastodon is as difficult to account for as that of the mammoth, and as will be noted, there is absolutely no evidence to show that man had any hand in it. Neither can it be ascribed to change of climate, for the mastodon, as indicated by the wide distribution of its bones, was apparently adapted to a great diversity of climates, and was as much at home amid the cool swamps of Michigan and New York as on the warm savannas of Florida and Louisiana. Certainly, the much used and abused glacial epic cannot be held accountable for the extermination of the creature, for the mastodon came into New York after the recession of the Great Ice Sheet, and tarried to so late a date that bones buried in the swamps retain much of their animal matter. So recent, comparatively speaking, has been the disappearance of the mastodon, and so fresh looking are some of its bones that Thomas Jefferson thought in his day that it might still be living in some part of the then unexplored Northwest. It is a moot question whether or not man and the mastodon were contemporaries in North America, and while many there be who, like the writer of these lines, believe that this was the case, an expression of belief is not a demonstration of fact. The best that can be said is that there are scattered bits of testimony, slight though they are, which seem to point that way, but no one so strong by itself that it could not be shaken by sharp cross questioning and enable man to prove an alibi in a trial by jury. For example, in the great bone deposit at Kimswick, Missouri, Mr. Beeler found a flint arrowhead, but this may have lain just over the bone-bearing layer, or have got in by some accident in excavating. How easily a mistake may be made is shown by the reports sent to the United States National Museum of many arrowheads associated with mastodon bones in a spring at Afton, Indian Territory. This spring was investigated, and a few mastodon bones and flint arrowheads were found, but the latter were in a stratum just above the bones, although this was overlooked by the first diggers. Footnote. This locality has just been carefully investigated by Mr. W. H. Holmes of the United States National Museum, who found bones of the mastodon and southern mammoth associated with arrowheads. But he also found fresh bones of bison, horse, and wolf, showing that these and the arrowheads had simply sunk to the level of the older deposit. End of footnote. Koch reported finding charcoal and arrowheads so associated with mastodon bones that he inferred the animal to have been destroyed by fire and arrows after it became mired. It has been said that Koch could have had no object in disseminating this report, and hence that it may be credited, but he had just as much interest in doing this as he did in fabricating the hydroarchus and the mazurium, and his testimony is not to be considered seriously. It seems to be with the mastodon much as it is with the sea serpent. The latter never appears to a naturalist. Remains of the former are never found by a trained observer associated with indications of the presence of man. Perhaps an exception should be made in the case of Professor J. M. Clark, who found fragments of charcoal in a deposit of muck under some bones of mastodon. We may pass by the so-called elephant mound, which to the eye of an unimaginative observer looks as if it might have been intended for any one of several beasts. Also, with bated breath and due respect for the bitter controversy waged over them, pass we by the elephant pipes. There remains then not a bit of man's handiwork, not a piece of pottery, engraved stone, or scratched bone that can unhesitatingly be said to have been wrought into the shape of an elephant before the coming of the white man. True, there is the Linape stone, found near Doyleston, Pennsylvania, in 1872. A gorge, it graven on one side with the representation of man attacking an elephant, while the other bears a number of figures of various animals. The good faith of the finder of this stone is unimpeachable, but it is a curious fact that while this gorge, it is elaborately decorated on both sides, no similar stone out of all that have been found bears any image whatsoever. On the other hand, if not made by the aborigines who made it, why was it made, and why did nine years elapse between the discovery of the first and second portions of the broken ornament? These are questions the reader may decide for himself. The author will only say that to his mind the drawing is too elaborate and depicts entirely too much to have been made by a primitive artist. A much better bit of testimony seems to be presented by a fragment of Folger's shell found near Hollyoak, Delaware, and now in the United States National Museum, which bears a very rudely scratched image of an animal that may have been intended for a mastodon or a bison. This piece of shell is undeniably old, but there is, unfortunately, the uncertainty just mentioned as to the animal depicted. The familiar legend of the big buffalo that destroyed animals and men, and defied even the lightnings of the Great Spirit, has been thought by some to have originated in a tradition of the mastodon handed down from ancient times. But why consider that the mastodon is meant? Why not a legendary bison that has increased with years of storytelling? And so the coexistence of man and mastodon must rest as a case of not proven, although there is a strong probability that the two did live together in the dim ages of the past, and someday the evidence may come to light that will prove it beyond a per-adventure. If scientific men are charged with obstinacy and unwarranted incredulity in declining to accept the testimony so far presented, it must be remembered that the evidence as to the existence of the sea serpent is far stronger since it rests on the testimony of eyewitnesses, and yet the creature himself has never been seen by a trained observer, nor has any specimen, not a scale, a tooth, or a bone ever made its way into any museum. References. There are at least 11 mounted skeletons of the mastodon in the United States, and the writer trusts he may be pardoned for mentioning only those which are most accessible. These are in the American Museum of Natural History, New York, the State Museum, Albany, New York, Field Columbian Museum, Chicago, Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. There is no mounted skeleton in the United States National Museum, nor has there ever been. The heaviest pair of tusks is in the possession of T. O. Tuttle, Seneca, Michigan, and they are nine and one-half inches in diameter and a little over eight feet long. Very few tusks, however, reach eight inches in diameter. The thigh bone of an old male mastodon measures from 45 to 46 and one-half inches long, the humerus from 35 to 40 inches. The height of the mounted skeleton is of little value as an indication of size, since it depends so much upon the manner in which the skeleton is mounted. The grinders of the mastodon have three cross ridges, save the last which has four, and a final elevation or heel. This does not apply to the teeth of very young animals. The presence or absence of the last grinder will show whether or not the animal is of full age and size, while the amount of wear indicates the comparative age of the specimen. The skeleton of the Warren mastodon is described at length by Dr. J. C. Warren in a quarto volume entitled, Mastodon Giganeus. There is much information in a little book by J. P. MacLean, Mastodon Mammoth and Man, but the reader must not accept all its statements unhesitatingly. The first volume, 1887, of the New Scribner's Magazine contains an article on American elephant myths by Professor W. B. Scott, but he is under an erroneous impression regarding the size of the mastodon, and photographs of the Maya carvings show that their resemblance to elephants has been exaggerated in the woodcuts. The story of the Lenape stone is