The proof that the elephant race actually inhabited this country is as satisfactory, and as well established, as that the species were different from any now existing. Little, indeed, can it be wondered at, upon the first discovery of their remains, that the accounts given by geologists and others were received with the greatest distrust. Their appearance, in these high latitudes, was attributed to the inroad of armies rather than to any indigenous connection with the soil that covers them. Cæsar, it was remembered, brought many elephants with him into Gaul. According to Polinæus, one at least was transported across the channel into Britain: hence an easy and ready explanation of the fossils, as Voltaire, in his time, fancied the shells found on mountain tops to be the stray specimens dropped by pious pilgrims or superstitious monks on their journeyings. But as their numbers increased—some from Ireland where the soldiers of Rome never set foot, along with the bones of the rhinoceros and hippopotamus which could be instructed in no military tactics, and all over the length and breadth of the land bones and entire skeletons began to be exhumed—all grounds for skepticism against their aboriginal national descent were forever swept away. And Britain, it was admitted, literally and truly, had once been stocked, among its most recently extinct families, with these monster tenants of the wilderness. An entire carcass, it is well known, covered with long woolly hair, was found at the mouth of the river Lena, as far north as the 74th degree of latitude, imbedded in ice. This discovery opened up more enlarged and correct views as to the history and habits of these animals. Subsequent years increased prodigiously the stock of fossils, entire and perfect in hide and fleshy muscle; and now, so abundant are the remains of the fossil mammalia in the arctic regions, that they have not only become an article of commercial traffic to man, but serve as an unfailing repository of food to the present denizens of those countries, the hordes of marauding wolves, foxes, and bears, which prey amid the polar regions and sterility. It has farther been ascertained that, where the lichen and the scanty moss now only grow, a rich arboreal vegetation once flourished in these latitudes; birch trees, of large dimensions, are everywhere imbedded in the sandy cliffs; and it is conjectured, with the greatest probability, that herds of elephants migrated from the warm interior, during the summer months, to the embouchures of the rivers and borders of the arctic sea, covered as they were with sheltering forests, or shrubby brushwood steppes. “As we advance,” says Murchison, “into the plains of Siberia, or descend into the valleys of Tobol and the Obe, the bones are in greater quantities, and in a better state of preservation; and the farther the Siberian rivers are followed to their mouths, the more do the mammalian remains increase, until at length whole skeletons, and