Part 43

The Russian naturalist Adams, in 1806, made a discovery quite as extraordinary as the preceding. We borrow his account from a paper by Dr. Tilesius in the “Memoirs of the Imperial Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg” (vol. v.). In 1799, a Tungusian chief, Ossip Schumachoff, while seeking for mammoth-horns on the banks of the lake Oncoul, perceived among the blocks of ice a shapeless mass, not at all resembling the large pieces of floating wood which are commonly found there. The following year he noticed that this mass was more disengaged from the blocks of ice, and had two projecting parts, but he was still unable to make out what it could be. Towards the end of the following summer one entire side of the animal and one of his tusks were quite free from the ice. But the succeeding summer of 1802, which was less warm and more windy than common, caused the Mammoth to remain buried in the ice, which had scarcely melted at all. At length, towards the end of the fifth year (1803), the ice between the earth and the Mammoth having melted faster than the rest, the plane of its support became inclined; and this enormous mass fell by its own weight on a bank of sand. In the month of March, 1804, Schumachoff cut off the horns (the tusks), which he exchanged with the merchant Bultenof for goods of the value of fifty roubles (not quite eight pounds sterling). It was not till two years after this that Mr. Adams, of the St. Petersburg Academy, who was travelling with Count Golovkin, sent by the Czar of Russia on an embassy to China, having been told at Jakutsk of the discovery of an animal of extraordinary magnitude on the shores of the Frozen Ocean, near the mouth of the river Lena, betook himself to the place. He found the Mammoth still in the same place, but altogether mutilated. The Jakoutskis of the neighbourhood had cut off the flesh, with which they fed their dogs; wild beasts, such as white bears, wolves, wolverines, and foxes, had also fed upon it, and traces of their footsteps were seen around. The skeleton, almost entirely cleared of its flesh, remained whole, with the exception of one fore-leg. The spine of the back, one scapula, the pelvis, and the other three limbs were still held together by the ligaments and by parts of the skin; the other scapula was found not far off. The head was covered with a dry skin; one of the ears was furnished with a tuft of hairs; the balls of the eyes were still distinguishable; the brain still occupied the cranium, but seemed dried up; the point of the lower lip had been gnawed and the upper lip had been destroyed so as to expose the teeth; the neck was furnished with a long flowing mane; the skin, of a dark-grey colour, covered with black hairs and a reddish wool, was so heavy that ten persons found great difficulty in transporting it to the shore. There was collected, according to Mr. Adams, more than thirty-six pounds’ weight of hair and wool which the white bears had trod into the ground, while devouring the flesh. This Mammoth was a male so fat and well fed, according to the assertion of the Tungusian chief, that its belly hung down below the joints of its knees. Its tusks were nine feet six inches in length, measured along the curve, and its head without the tusks weighed 414 pounds avoirdupois.

Mr. Adams took every care to collect all that remained of this unique specimen of an ancient creation, and forwarded the parts to St. Petersburg, a distance of 11,000 versts (7,330 miles). He succeeded in re-purchasing what he believed to be the tusks at Jakutsk, and the Emperor of Russia, who became the owner of this precious relic, paid him 8,000 roubles. The skeleton is deposited in the Museum of the Academy of St. Petersburg, and the skin still remains attached to the head and the feet. “We have yet to find,” says Cuvier, “any individual equal to it.”

Beside the skeleton of this famous Mammoth there is placed that of an Indian Elephant, and another Elephant with skin and hair, in order that the visitor may have a proper appreciation of the vast proportions of the Mammoth, as compared with them. PLATE XXVI., on the opposite page, represents the saloon of the Museum of St. Petersburg, which contains these three interesting remains.

In 1860 a great number of bones of the Mammoth, with remains of Hyæna, Horse, Reindeer, Rhinoceros-megarhinus, and Bison, were found in Belgium in digging a canal at Lierre, in the province of Antwerp. An entire skeleton of a young Mammoth, eleven feet six inches high (to the shoulder), has been reconstructed from these remains by M. Dupont, and is now placed in the Royal Museum of Natural History in Brussels.

H. Woodward, Geological Magazine, vol. viii., p. 193.

We cannot doubt, after such testimony, of the existence in the frozen north, of the almost entire remains of the Mammoth. The animals seem to have perished suddenly; enveloped in ice at the moment of their death, their bodies have been preserved from decomposition by the continued action of the cold. If we suppose that one of those animals had sunk into a marsh which froze soon afterwards, or had fallen accidentally into the crevasse of some glacier, it would be easy for us to understand how its body, buried immediately under eternal ice, had remained there for thousands of years without undergoing decomposition.

In Cuvier’s great work on fossil bones, he gives a long and minute enumeration of the various regions of Germany, France, Italy, and other countries, which have furnished in our days bones or tusks of the Mammoth. We venture to quote two of these descriptions:--“In October, 1816,” he says, “there was discovered at Seilberg, near Canstadt, in Würtemberg, near which some remarkable discoveries were made in 1700, a very remarkable deposit, which the king, Frederick I., caused to be excavated, and its contents collected with the greatest care. We are even assured that the visit which the prince, in his ardour for all that was great, paid to this spot, aggravated the malady of which he died a few days after. An officer, Herr Natter, commenced some excavations, and in four-and-twenty hours discovered twenty-one teeth or fragments of teeth of elephant, mixed with a great number of bones. The king having ordered him to continue the excavations, on the second day they came upon a group of thirteen tusks heaped close upon each other, and along with them some molar teeth, lying as if they had been packed artificially. It was on this discovery that the king caused himself to be transported thither, and ordered all the surrounding soil to be dug up, and every object to be carefully preserved in its original position. The largest of the tusks, though it had lost its points and its roots, was still eight feet long and one foot in diameter. Many isolated tusks were also found, with a quantity of molar teeth, from two inches to a foot in length, some still adhering to the jaws. All these fragments were better preserved than those of 1700, which was attributed to the depth of the bed, and, perhaps, to the nature of the soil. The tusks were generally much curved. In the same deposit some bones of Horses and Stags were found, together with a quantity of teeth of the Rhinoceros, and others which were thought to belong to a Bear, and one specimen which was attributed to the Tapir. The place where this discovery was made is named Seilberg; it is about 600 paces from the city of Canstadt, but on the opposite side of the Necker.

“All the great river basins of Germany have, like those of the Necker, yielded fossil bones of the Elephant; those especially abutting on the Rhine are too numerous to be mentioned, nor is Canstadt the only place in the valley of the Necker where they are found.”

But of all parts of Europe, that in which they are found in greatest numbers is the valley of the Upper Arno. We find there a perfect cemetery of Elephants. These bones were at one time so common in this valley, that the peasantry employed them, indiscriminately with stones, in constructing walls and houses. Since they have learned their value, however, they reserve them for sale to travellers.

The bones and tusks of the Mammoth are met with in America as well as in the Old World, scattered through Canada, Oregon, and the Northern States as far south as the Gulf of Mexico. Cuvier enumerates several places on that continent where their remains are met with, mingled with those of the Mastodon. The Russian Lieutenant Kotzebue found them on the north coast of America, in the cliffs of frozen mud in Eschsholtz Bay, within Behring’s Strait, and in other distant parts of the shores of the Arctic Seas, where they were so common that the sailors burnt many pieces in their fires.

It is very strange that the East Indies, that is, one of the only two regions which is now the home of the Elephant, should be almost the only country in which the fossil bones of these animals have not been discovered. In short, from the preceding enumeration, it appears that, during the geological period whose history we are recording the gigantic Mammoth inhabited most regions of the globe. Now-a-days, the only climates which are suited for the existing race of Elephants are those of Africa and India, that is to say, tropical countries; from which we must draw the conclusions to which so many other inferences lead, that, at the epoch in which these animals lived, the temperature of the earth was much higher than in our days; or, more probably, the extinct race of Elephants must have been adapted for living in a colder climate than that which they now require.

Among the antediluvian Carnivora, one of the most formidable seems to have been the Ursus spelæus, or Cave-bear (Fig. 183). This species must have been a fifth, if not a fourth, larger than the Brown Bear of our days. It was also more squat: some of the skeletons we possess are from nine to ten feet long, and only about six feet high. The U. spelæus abounded in England, France, Belgium, and Germany; and so extensively in the latter country, that the teeth of the antediluvian Bear, as we have already stated, formed for a long time part of its materia medica, under the name of fossil licorn. Fig. 183 represents the skull of the Cave-bear.

At the same time with the Ursus spelæus another Carnivore, the Felis spelæus, or Cave-lion, lived in Europe. This animal is specifically identical with the living Lion of Asia and Africa: but since in these early times he had not to contend with the hunter for food, he was, on the whole, considerably larger than any Lion now existing on the earth.

The Hyænas of our age consist of two species, the striped and the spotted Hyænas. The last presents considerable conformity in its structure with that of the Post-pliocene period, which Cuvier designates under the name of the fossil Spotted Hyæna. It seems to have been only a little larger than the existing species. Fig. 184 represents the head of the Hyæna spelæa, whose remains, with those of others, were found in the caves of Kirkdale and Kent’s Hole; the remains of about 300 being found in the former. Dr. Buckland satisfied himself, from the quantity of their dung, that the Hyænas had lived there. In the cave were found remains of the ox, young elephant, rhinoceros, horse, bear, wolf, hare, water-rat, and several birds. All the bones present an appearance of having been broken and gnawed by the teeth of the Hyænas, and they occur confusedly mixed in loam or mud, or dispersed through the crust of stalagmite which covered the contents of the cave.

The Horse dates from the Quaternary epoch, if not from the last period of the Tertiary epoch. Its remains are found in the same rocks with those of the Mammoth and the Rhinoceros. It is distinguished from our existing Horse only by its size, which was smaller--its remains abound in the Post-pliocene rocks, not only in Europe, but in America; so that an aboriginal Horse existed in the New World long before it was carried thither by the Spaniards, although we know that it was unknown at the date of their arrival. “Certainly it is a marvellous fact in the history of the Mammalia, that in South America, a native horse should have lived and disappeared, to be succeeded in after ages by the countless herds descended from the few introduced with the Spanish colonists!”

“Darwin’s Journal,” p. 130.

The Oxen of the period, if not identical with, were at least very near to our living species. There were three species: the Bison priscus, B. primigenius, and B. Pallasii; the first with slender legs, with convex frontal, broader than it was high, and differing but slightly from the Aurochs, except in being taller and by having larger horns. The remains of Bison priscus are found in England, France, Italy, Germany, Russia, and America. Bison primigenius was, according to Cuvier, the source of our domestic cattle. The Bos Pallasii is found in America and in Siberia, and resembles in many respects the Musk-ox of Canada.

Where these great Mammals are found we generally discover the fossil remains of several species of Deer. The palæontological question as regards these animals is very obscure, and it is often difficult to determine whether the remains belong to an extinct or an existing species. This doubt does not extend, however, to the gigantic forest-stag, Cervus megaceros, one of the most magnificent of the antediluvian animals, whose remains are still frequently found in Ireland in the neighbourhood of Dublin; more rarely in France, Germany, Poland, and Italy. Intermediate between the Fallow-deer and the Elk, the Cervus megaceros partakes of the Elk in its general proportions and in the form of its cranium, but it approaches the Fallow-deer in its size and in the disposition of its horns. These magnificent appendages, however, while they decorated the head of the animal and gave a most imposing appearance to it, must have sadly impeded its progress through the thick and tangled forests of the ancient world. The length of these horns was between nine and ten feet; and they were so divergent that, measured from one extremity to the other, they occupied a space of between three and four yards.

The skeleton of the Cervus megaceros is found in the deposits of calcareous tufa, which underlie the immense peat moss of Ireland; sometimes in the turf itself, as near the Curragh in Kildare; in which position they sometimes occur in little mounds piled up in a small space, and nearly always in the same attitude, the head aloft, the neck stretched out, the horns reversed and thrown downwards towards the back, as if the animal, suddenly immersed into marshy ground, had been under the necessity of throwing up its head in search of respirable air. In the Geological Cabinet of the Sorbonne, at Paris, there is a magnificent skeleton of Cervus megaceros; another belongs to the College of Surgeons in London; and there is a third at Vienna.

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The most remarkable creatures of the period, however, were the great Edentates--the Glyptodon, the gigantic Megatherium, the Mylodon and the Megalonyx. The order of Edentates is more particularly characterised by the absence of teeth in the fore part of the mouth. The masticating apparatus of the Edentates consists only of molars, the incisors and canine teeth being, with a few exceptions, absent altogether, as the animals composing this order feed chiefly on insects or the tender leaves of plants. The Armadillo, Anteater and Pangolin, are the living examples of the order. We may add, as still further characteristics, largely developed claws at the extremities of the toes. The order seems thus to establish itself as a zoological link in the chain between the hoofed Mammals and the ungulated animals, or those armed with claws. All these animals are peculiar to the continent of America.

The Glyptodon, which appears during the Quaternary period, belonged to the family of Armadilloes, and their most remarkable feature was the presence of a hard, scaly shell, or coat of mail six feet in length, and composed of numerous segments, which covered the entire upper service of the animal from the head to the tail. It was, in short, a mammiferous animal, which appears to have been enclosed in a shell like that of a Turtle; it resembled in many respects the Dasypus or Anteater, and had sixteen teeth in each jaw. These teeth were channelled laterally with two broad and deep grooves, which divided the surface of the molars into three parts, whence it was named the Glyptodon. The hind feet were broad and massive, and evidently designed to support a vast incumbent mass; it presented phalanges armed with short thick and depressed nails or claws. The animal was, as we have said, enveloped in, and protected by, a cuirass, or solid carapace, composed of plates which, seen from beneath, appeared to be hexagonal and united by denticulated sutures: above they represented double rosettes. The habitat of Glyptodon clavipes was the pampas of Buenos Ayres, and the banks of an affluent of the Rio Santo, near Monte Video; specimens have been found not less than nine feet in length.

The tesselated carapace of the Glyptodon was long thought to belong to the Megatherium; but Professor Owen shows, from the anatomical structure of the two animals, that the cuirass belonged to one of them only, namely, the Glyptodon.

The Schistopleuron does not differ essentially from the Glyptodon, but is supposed to have been a different species of the same genus; the chief difference between the two animals being in the structure of the tail, which is massive in the first and in the other composed of half a score of rings. In other respects the organisation and habits are similar, both being herbivorous, and feeding on roots and vegetables. Fig. 185 represents the Schistopleuron typus restored, and as it appeared when alive.

Some of the fossil Tortoises discovered in the sub-Himalayan beds possessed a carapace twelve feet long by six feet in breadth, which must have corresponded to an animal from eighteen to twenty feet in length; and the bones of the legs were as massive as those of the Rhinoceros.

The Megatherium, or Animal of Paraguay, as it was called, is, at first view, the oddest and most remarkable animal we have yet had under consideration, where all have been, according to our notions, strange, extraordinary, and formidable. The animal creation still goes on as if--

“Nature made them and then broke the die.”

If we cast a glance at the skeleton figured on the opposite page (PLATE XXVII.), which was found in Paraguay, at Buenos Ayres, in 1788, and which is now placed, in a perfect state of preservation, in the Museum of Natural History in Madrid, it is impossible to avoid being struck with its unusually heavy form, at once awkward as a whole, and ponderous in most of its parts. It is allied to the existing genus of Sloths, which Buffon tells us is “of all the animal creation that which has received the most vicious organisation--a being to which Nature has forbidden all enjoyment; which has only been created for hardships and misery.” This notion of the romantic Buffon is, however, altogether incorrect. An attentive examination of the Animal of Paraguay shows that its organisation cannot be considered either odd or awkward when viewed in connection with its mode of life and individual habits. The special organisation which renders the movements of the Sloths so sluggish, and apparently so painful on level ground, gives them, on the other hand, marvellous assistance when they live in trees, the leaves of which constitute their exclusive food. In the same manner, if we consider that the Megatherium was created to burrow in the earth and feed upon the roots of trees and shrubs, every organ of its heavy frame would appear to be perfectly appropriate to its kind of life, and well adapted to the special purpose which was assigned to it by the Creator. We ought to place the Megatherium between the Sloths and the Anteaters. Like the first, it usually fed on the branches and leaves of trees; like the latter, it burrowed deep in the soil, finding there both food and shelter. It was as large as an Elephant or Rhinoceros of the largest species. Its body measured twelve or thirteen feet in length, and it was between five and six feet high. The engraving on page 403 (PLATE XXVII.) will convey, more accurately than any mere verbal description, an idea of the form and proportions of the animal.