Part 7 (2/2)
_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 coa.r.s.e 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. Beach and mentioned in the text still holds the record for mammoth tusks. The greatest development of tusks occurred in Elephas ganesa, a species found in Pliocene deposits of the Siwalik Hills, India. This species appears not to have exceeded the existing elephant in bulk, but the tusks are twelve feet nine inches long, and two feet two inches in circ.u.mference. 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 Elephas columbi in the United States National Museum is ten and one-half inches high, nine inches wide, the grinding face being eight by five inches. This tooth, which is unusually perfect, retaining the outer covering of cement, came from Afton, Indian Territory, and weighs a little over fifteen pounds.
The lower tooth, shown in Fig. 38, is twelve inches long, and the grinding face is nine by three and one-half inches; this is also from Elephas columbi. 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 five feet four inches long, and a humerus measuring four feet three inches, these being the largest bones on record indicating an animal fourteen 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 Nordenskiold in ”The Voyage of the Vega” and ”The Mammoth and the Flood” by Sir Henry Howorth, is a mine of information.
Mr. Townsend's ”Alaska Live-Mammoth Story” may be found in ”Forest and Stream” for August 14, 1897._
[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 37.--The Mammoth as Engraved by a Primitive Artist on a Piece of Mammoth Tusk.]
XI
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 mastodons the crown, or grinding face of the tooth, is formed by more or less regular /-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 mastodons the roots of the teeth are long p.r.o.ngs, 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 38.--Tooth of Mastodon and of Mammoth.]
There is usually, or at least often, another point of difference between elephants and mastodons, 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 relations.h.i.+ps of the mastodon; for in Europe are found remains of a huge beast well called Dinotherium, 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 Dinotherium 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 ma.s.sive leg-bones has definitely settled the question as to whether it did or did not have limbs.
There is another hint of relations.h.i.+p 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 dentine, 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 hints 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 served some good purpose, like the familiar b.u.t.tons 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 b.u.t.tons 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 b.u.t.tons, ruffles, and the vermiform appendix of which we hear so much all fall in the category of vestigial structures.
Where the mastodons originated, we know not: Senor Ameghino 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.[18]
[18] _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._
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 s.e.x 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 america.n.u.s_,[19] and unless otherwise specified this alone will be meant when the name mastodon is used. 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 preserved 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 to-day 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.
[19] _This has also been called giganteus and ohioticus, but the name america.n.u.s claims priority, and should therefore be used._
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 (of England?) written at Boston on November 17th, in which he speaks of a large work in ma.n.u.script ent.i.tled _Biblia Americana_, and gives as a sample a note on the pa.s.sage in Genesis (VI. 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, seventeen feet long,” the total length of the body being taken as seventy-five 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 C. W. Peale. This specimen was described at some length by Rembrandt Peale 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 Peale's Museum in Philadelphia where, with much other valuable material, it was destroyed by fire.
Struck by the evident crus.h.i.+ng power of the great ridged molars, Peale 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 Peale 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 39.--The Missourium of Koch, from a Tracing of the Figure Ill.u.s.trating Koch's Description.]
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