upper portions of the side toes of the Hippotherium 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, and 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
"Clique, 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
Hyracothere 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
Hyracothere 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 drouth 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 dray 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._
[Illustration: Fig. 35.--The Mammoth. _From a drawing by Charles R.
Knight._]
X
THE MAMMOTH
"_His legs were as thick as the bole of the beech,
His tusks as the buttonwood white,
While his lithe trunk wound like a sapling around
An oak in the whirlwind's might._"
_In the October number of McClure's Magazine for 1899 was
published a short story, "The Killing of the Mammoth," by "H.
Tukeman," 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
"Mammut," and Cuvier gallicized this into "Mammouth," 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.
To-day, nearly every one knows that the mammoth was a sort of big,
hairy elephant, now extinct, and nearly every one 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 twelve to twenty 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
eleven feet high, the rule of three applied to this thigh-bone would
give the living animal a height of thirteen feet eight inches. The
height of this specimen is given as thirteen feet in its bones, with an
estimate of fourteen feet in its clothes; but as the skeleton is
obviously mounted altogether too high, it is pretty safe to say that
thirteen 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 twelve 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 _Elephas
primigenius_, 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
_Elephas meridionalis_ of southern Europe, and _Elephas columbi_ of our
Southern and Western States, but even the largest cannot positively be
asserted to have exceeded a height of thirteen feet. Tusks offer
convenient terms of comparison, and those of an average fully grown
mammoth are from eight to ten feet in length; those of the famous St.
Petersburg specimen and those of the huge specimen in Chicago measuring
respectively nine feet three inches, and nine feet eight inches. So far
as the writer is aware, the largest tusks actually measured are two from
Alaska, one twelve feet ten inches long, weighing 190 pounds, reported
by Mr. Jay Beach; and another eleven 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 nine feet
long, and weighing 184 pounds, or the largest shown at Chicago in 1893,
which was seven feet six 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 Messrs. Tiffany & Company
in 1900. The measurements and weights of these were as follows: length
along outer curve, ten feet and three-fourths of an inch, circumference
one foot, eleven inches, weight, 224 pounds; length along outer curve,
ten feet, three and one-half inches, circumference two feet and
one-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 discoverer 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.
[Illustration: Fig. 36.--Skeleton of the Mammoth in the Royal Museum of
St. Petersburg.]
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
Cromer 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 to-day, while from the depths of the North
Sea the hardy trawlers have dredged hundreds, aye thousands, of mammoth
teeth in company with soles 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 Teutobochus, King of the Cimbri, a lusty warrior
said to have had a height of nineteen feet. Somewhat smaller, but still
of respectable height, fourteen feet, was "Littell Johne" of Scotland,
whereof Hector Boece wrote, concluding, in a moralizing tone, "Be quilk
(which) it appears how extravegant and squaire pepill grew in oure
regioun afore they were effeminat 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 worshipped as relics of
Christian saints. Did not the church of Valencia possess an elephant
tooth which did duty as that of St. 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.[15] 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,
some day one may yet come to light. That there is some possibility of
this is shown by the discovery, recorded by Mr. Dall, 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
adipocere, 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.
[15] _This must be taken as a very general statement, as the distinction
between and habitats of Elephas primigenius and Elephas columbi, the
southern mammoth, are not satisfactorily determined; moreover, the two
species overlap through a wide area of the West and Northwest._
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 to-day 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 untrodden 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 thence, for 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 Landseer
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 belonged 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 varied 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 aright, held the record of farthest north on
the Pacific side. On one of these northern trips, to the Kotzebue Sound
region, famous for the abundance of its deposits of mammoth bones,[16]
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.
[16] _Elephant Point, at the mouth of the Buckland River, is so named
from the numbers of mammoth bones which have accumulated there._
Fortunately, or unfortunately, there was on board a text-book 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 Innuit sprawled out at full length on the deck. Now the
Innuits, as Mr. Townsend tells us, are great gadabouts, making long
sledge journeys in winter and equally long trips by boat in summer,
while each season they hold a regular fair on Kotzebue 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 Innuits had become well acquainted
with the appearance of the mammoth, a knowledge that naturally they were
well pleased to display to any white visitors. Also, like the Celt, 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. Tukeman, 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. Conradi
for the mammoth which is _not_ in the Smithsonian Institution, would
place one there.[17] 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.
[17] _Since these lines were written another fine example of the Mammoth
has been discovered in Siberia and even now (Oct., 1901) an expedition
is on its way to secure the skin and skeleton for the Academy of Natural
Sciences at St. Petersburg._
_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, Elephas 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._