Of true elephants, the North American Pleistocene had three species. Most interesting of these is the northern or Siberian †Mammoth (_Elephas †primigenius_), a late immigrant from northern Asia, which came in by way of Alaska, where Bering Land (as we may call the raised bed of Bering Sea) connected it with Asia. The †Mammoth was abundant in Alaska, British Columbia and all across the northern United States to the Atlantic coast. Hardly any fossil mammal is so well known as this, for the carcasses entombed in the frozen gravels of northern Siberia have preserved every detail of structure. It is thus definitely known that the †Mammoth was well adapted to a cold climate and was covered with a dense coat of wool beneath an outer coating of long, coarse hair, while the contents of the stomach and the partially masticated food found in the mouth show that the animal fed upon the same vegetation as grows in northern Siberia to-day. The grinding teeth were very high, cement-covered, and composed of many thin plates of enamel, dentine and cement, and were closely similar to those of the existing Indian Elephant (_E. maximus_). In size this is the smallest of the three Pleistocene species, 9 feet at the shoulder. The †Mammoth was not peculiar to Siberia and North America, but extended also into Europe, where it was familiar to Palæolithic Man, as is attested by the spirited and lifelike carvings and cave-paintings of that date. Thus, during some part of the Pleistocene, this species ranged around the entire northern hemisphere. Closely related to the †Mammoth and in some cases hardly distinguishable from it, is the †Columbian Elephant (_E. †columbi_) which, however, attained a considerably larger size, as much as 11 feet, rivalling the largest African elephants of the present time. The head was very high and had a curiously peaked appearance, and the tusks in old males curved inward, overlapping at the tips. From the likeness in teeth and skeleton to the †Mammoth, it may be inferred, though somewhat doubtfully, that the †Columbian Elephant was clothed with hair, but not so heavily as the †Mammoth, which was a northern species, the Columbian form replacing it southward, and ranging over the whole United States, including Florida and even throughout the table-land of Mexico. The areas of the two species overlapped along the northernmost United States, but are elsewhere distinct. [Illustration: FIG. 114.—Restoration of the †Columbian Elephant (_Elephas †columbi_) from a skeleton in the American Museum of Natural History.]