When he returned the next year he perceived that the mass was more free from the ice, and that it had two projections. About the end of 1801, he beheld the entire side of a gigantic animal and one of its enormous tusks. Here was a mine of wealth for the ivory-collector, and he hastened home to tell the news to his wife and friends. But this mine would seem to have been like the treasures of old, where there was a guardian spirit of no very gentle character to be overcome, or a fiend roused, ready to rend the intruder limb from limb. His intelligence was received by his family and familiars in a way that turned his joy into mourning. The old men shook their heads and remembered a saying of their fathers, that the discovery of a similar monster had been speedily followed by the death of all the family of the discoverer. Imagination and superstition will do their work when the mind is not enlightened by education and fortified by learning and experience, and our poor Tungusian fell ill in good earnest. He recovered, however, and cupidity came hand in hand with returning health, for he thought of the noble tusks of the icy-shrouded mammoth, and how much they would bring into his purse. The summer of 1802 had been cold and churlish, and the mammoth still lay almost as completely entombed in his glacier as ever; but towards the termination of the fifth year the more genial weather operated so effectually on the ice, that the result was an inclined plane, and down came the mountain of frozen mummy on a sandbank. In 1804, the recovered Tungusian visited his prize, cut off the tusks, and made fifty roubles by them in his dealings with a merchant.

When Mr. Adams arrived at the place, two years afterwards, that is, in the seventh year after the discovery, he found the mammoth, but it had undergone sad mutilation. The flesh of the carcase was so fresh, that the inhabitants of Jakataski fed their dogs with it, and the white bears, wolves, wolverines, and foxes, that had feasted on the remains, had left the traces of their footsteps around it. There lay the skeleton almost entirely fleshless, and complete with the exception of one fore-leg, with which the strongest of the unbidden carnivorous guests had probably walked off. The ligaments and portions of the skin held together the vertebral column, one shoulder-blade, the haunch bones, and the other three extremities. A dry skin covered the head, and one well-preserved ear was tufted with hair. The apex of the lower lip had been gnawed away; the upper lip and proboscis had been devoured, and the molar teeth were brought into view. In the skull was the brain, but as dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage. Of the tail only eight of twenty-eight or thirty vertebræ remained; but a fore-foot and a hind-foot were covered with skin,

and the sole remained attached. Some of the skin is in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and, when it was first brought there, it smelt offensively. The covering of the skin, which was of a dark gray colour, was woolly and hairy. The woolly or curly portion was of a reddish hue, and some of the coarse, long black hairs or bristles were a foot and a half long. This mammoth was a male; his neck was ornamented with a long mane, and he must have been one of the Falstaffs of the primeval forests; for, according to Schumachoff, he was so fat that his portly belly hung down below his knees. The skeleton with the tusks is now mounted at St. Petersburg, in the museum of the Petropolitan Academy. From the front of the skull to the end of the tail, or rather, of as much as remains of it, the skeleton measures sixteen feet four inches; the height is nine feet four inches; and the tusks, measured along the curve, were nine feet six inches.

Such was the well-preserved animal enclosed in the ice: but "how gat he there ?"

Cuvier, and he had his followers, had recourse to the Deus in machind, in the shape of a great and sudden geological cataclysm, affirming that the change of temperature was immediate, in short, that at the moment when the animal was destroyed, the soil on which he trod became “fields of thick-ribbed ice." Lyell, with more respect for the Horatian precept,† and in a truly philosophical spirit, shows how these phenomena, which were supposed to be the result of sudden and violent changes, may be accounted for by the gradual operation of ordinary and existing causes, and Professor Owen, in his admirable "History of British Fossil Mammalia," entirely dissipates the difficulty raised with regard to the non-existence of the food necessary for the animal's subsistence. It would be unjust to the professor to clothe his reasoning in other words than his own.

"Dr. Fleming," writes the professor, "has observed that 'no one acquainted with the gramineous character of the food of our fallow-deer, stag, or roe, would have assigned a lichen to the rein deer.' But we may readily believe, that any one cognisant of the food of the elk, might be likely to have suspected cryptogamic vegetation to have entered more largely into the food of a still more northern species of the deer tribe. And I can by no means subscribe to another proposition by the same eminent

* Mr. Adams in his interesting account states that the skin was of such extraordinary weight, that ten persons found great difficulty in transporting it to the shore. || Principles of geology.

+ De arte poeticâ, line 191.

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 60°. 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.

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