naturalist, that the kind of food which the existing species of elephant prefers, will not enable us to determine, or even to offer a probable conjecture concerning that of the extinct species.' The molar teeth of the elephant possess, as we have seen, a highly complicated and a very peculiar structure, and there are no other quadrupeds that derive so great a portion of their food from the woody fibre of the branches of trees. Many mammals browse the leaves; some small rodents gnaw the bark; the elephants alone tear down and crunch the branches, the vertical enamel-plates of their huge grinders enabling them to pound the tough vegetable tissue, and fit it for deglutition. No doubt the foliage is the most tempting as it is the most succulent part of the boughs devoured; but the relation of the complex molars to the comminution of the coarser vegetable substance, is unmistakeable. Now, if we find in an extinct elephant the same peculiar principle of construction in the molar teeth, but with augmented complexity, arising from a greater number of triturating plates, and a greater profusion of the dense enamel, the inference is plain that the ligneous fibre must have entered in a larger proportion into the food of such extinct species. Forests of hardy trees and shrubs still grow upon the frozen soil of Siberia, and skirt the banks of the Lena as far north as latitude 60o. In Europe, arboreal vegetation extends ten degrees nearer to the pole, and the dental organization of the mammoth proves that it might have derived subsistence from the leafless branches of trees, in regions covered during a great part of the year with snow. We may, therefore, safely infer, from physiological grounds, that the mammoth would have found the requisite means of subsistence at the present day, and at all seasons, in the sixtieth parallel of latitude; and, relying on the body of evidence adduced by Mr. Lyell, in proof of increased severity in the climate of the northern hemisphere, we may assume that the mammoth habitually frequented still higher latitudes at the period of its actual existence. It has been suggested,' observes the same philosophic writer; 'that as in our time, the northern animals migrate, so the Siberian elephant and rhinoceros may have wandered towards the north in summer.' In making such excursions during the heat of that brief season, the mammoths would be arrested in their northern progress by a condition to which the rein-deer and musk-ox are not subject, viz., the limits of arboreal vegetation, which, however, as represented by the dominating shrubs of Polar lands, would allow them to reach the seventieth degree of latitude. But with this limitation, if the physiological inferences regarding the food of the mammoth from the structure of its teeth be adequately appreciated and connected with those which may be legitimately

deduced from the ascertained nature of its integument, the necessity of recurring to the forces of mighty rivers, hurrying along a carcase through a devious course, extending through an entire degree of latitude, in order to account for its ultimate entombment in the ice, whilst so little decomposed as to have retained the cuticle and hair, will disappear. And it can no longer be regarded as impossible for herds of mammoths to have obtained subsistence in a country like the Southern part of Siberia where trees abound, notwithstanding it is covered during a great part of the year with snow, seeing that the leafless state of such trees during even a long and severe Siberian winter, would not necessarily unfit their branches for yielding sustenance to the wellclothed mammoth."

Gigantic as the Siberian mammoth was, there is evidence to prove that the species was developed to still greater proportions. We have seen a mammoth's tusk that measured ten feet two inches along the curve, and a comparison of the cast of the third or middle metacarpal bone of one found in the brick earth at Grays, in Essex (which may be seen in the museum of the English College of Surgeons), with the corresponding bone in the skeleton of Chunee in the same noble collection, will give some idea of the huge bulk of the extinct species.

The old bull mammoth was at least one-third larger in all his dimensions than the largest existing elephant; but no human eye beheld him as he stalked silently along in his might over desolate tracts where corn now grows, and the busy hum of civilization is heard,

"Lord of his presence and the land besides."

DRAGONS.

"The Dragon of Wantley churches ate
(He us'd to come of a Sunday),
Whole congregations were to him
A dish of Salmagundi.

Parsons were his black-puddings, and
Fat aldermen his capons,

And his tit-bit the collection plate

Brimful of Birmingham halfpence.
The corporation worshipful

He valued not an ace :

But swallow'd the mayor, asleep in his chair,
And pick'd his teeth with the mace!"

HEROICK BALLAD.

GREAT as has been the progress made in the wide field of natural history within the last thirty years, in no direction has the advance been more decided or more satisfactory, than in that hitherto obscure part of it which sepulchres the remains of animals that lorded it over sea and land when this earth was young.

And although there is nothing among the earliest known organized forms fashioned by the hand which weigheth all things, that is not pregnant with proof of the same care and design and harmony in the construction of the animal, as shines forth in the being born into the world yesterday, let no one picture unto him or herself the youth of our planet as lovely to any but the grosser natures then placed upon it to breathe an atmosphere which no human lungs, nay, no lungs of any vertebrate of a high grade could have long breathed as the breath of life. It was a place of dragons fit only for Saurians, Batrachians, and the like. "Dragons ?"

Yes, dragons: not such as the small, living winged reptiles, that skim from place to place in search of their insect food, relying on their natural parachutes, constructed upon a somewhat safer principle than that of poor Mr. Cocking, and rejoicing in the generic name of Draco; but downright enormous dragons with bellies as big as tuns and bigger; creatures that would have cared

little for Bevis's sword "Morglaye," nor that of the Rhodian Draconicide, nor St. George's "Askalon," no, nor the "nothingat-all" of More of More Hall, even if those worthies could have existed in the pestiferous region in which the said dragons revelled.

For in a slough where Calamites and other gigantic marshplants, now extinct also, rooted themselves at ease, and reared themselves into a damp jungle; in a dreary bog, to which the undrained Pontine marshes would have been the land of health, was their lair. In such a nauseous quag, wholesome to them, these monsters roared and wallowed: there they growled their horrid loves, and there they made war upon each other-the strong devouring the weak, and the carnivorous "chawing-up" the herbivorous in the midst of the wildest convulsions of a nascent world.

While this was going on upon what then passed for dry land, great sea-dragons rushed through the waves, or sported on the surface of an ocean not unlike, as far as the waters were concerned, our own, while flying dragons hovered, like Shakspeare's Witches, through the fog and the filthy air. These last ancient Saurian forms have left no living representative upon the earth.

Just one hundred years ago, Scheuchzer published his " Physica Sacra," and favoured the world with an engraving of the remains of the "Homo diluvii testis." Those were, indeed, the days of confident assertion, when the blind led the blind; but it is difficult to believe how a physician, for such was Scheuchzer in every sense of the word, writing M.D. after his name, could mistake the fossil bones of a salamander, or rather of a newt, for those of a human being. "Homo diluvii testis," what a comprehensive form of words-Poussin's picture rises before us as we read them -and yet 'twas neither man, woman, nor child, but a squab extinct reptile, that never witnessed the deluge at all.

As the Zurich physician had figured the man, he gave his draughtsman directions to portray man's eternal enemy, and the accomplished artist has with some invention and in his best manner represented the fiend. The usual diabolical head and shoulders of the time are placed upon the body of a huge polypod caterpillar.

Now, we do not feel disposed to go so far as the charitable preacher, who, after exhausting his benevolent prayers for all earthly beings, proposed to his congregation to pray for "the puir deil." No, let justice be done; but this is more than summum ius, and beyond summa injuria. The doom was deserved; but a degradation of the old dragon below any thing vertebrate to the base condition of an annulose animal, to a le grub, was not in

the sentence, and if the Prince of Darkness be a gentleman, Scheuchzer has not treated him like one.

There are more ways than one of looking at a subject," says Mr. Serjeant Rebutter, retained in defence of the author of "Physica Sacra;" "there are, I say, more ways than one of looking at a subject: permit me to suggest that Beelzebub was the lord of flies, and a caterpillar may be a butterfly.

"Then, sir, the moral is as bad as the design; but the truth is that degradation was meant, and the notion is clumsily conveyed. Scheuchzer seems to have shone in the one case as brightly as in the other, and has treated his subjects very scurvily in both.” But to return to our mortal dragons.

It may be fairly asked by the uninitiated why the philosophers of 1943 should not smile at the Cuviers, and at the Conybeares, the Bucklands, and the Owens of 1843, as complacently as we of the present day curl our lip at old Scheuchzer?

Because his work was almost all guess: because he and those of his time jumped to conclusions instead of painfully making them out, and the authority of a learned name was sufficient with the multitude to insure without further inquiry the reception of any dictum, however absurd on the face of it, as Scheuchzer's assertion, coupled with his imposing plate undoubtedly was. No man who had the knowledge of a diligent medical student in the first half year of his anatomical studies could, if he had looked attentively on that plate, much less on the fossil itself, have come to the conclusion that it was an anthropolite. But Scheuchzer was blinded by theory: he would not apply what knowledge he had he pronounced the humanity of the fossil to be without a shadow of doubt; he appealed to it as "a relic of the accursed race which had been buried under the great waters;" and he was for a time, implicitly believed. It was not till 1758 that Gesner, apparently for the first time since Scheuchzer's announcement, threw doubt on his declaration, and stated his own belief that the specimen was a fish (Silurus).

Cuvier, before whose eye all false fossil pretensions vanished, and every bone told its true story, came to Haarlem in 1811, and begged permission to work on the stone with a view to the further development of concealed parts. The figure of a salamander's skeleton was placed beside the fossil, and as the operation proceeded Cuvier had the pleasure of seeing the chisel bring to light the very bones which he had expected and which were portrayed in the figure.

A finer specimen than Scheuchzer's-that which belonged to Dr. Ammann of Zurich-is in the British Museum, and this gigantic fossil newt is now named Andrias Scheuchzeri.