A very curious example of the Siberian Mammoth was discovered only a few years ago by a Lamut of one of the Arctic villages, and through the energy of Dr. Herz was eventually removed in pieces to St. Petersburg. In the Zoological Museum there the reconstructed Mammoth now crawls out of a huge pit, for it was by falling into a pit that this fine beast met his death hundreds of generations ago. It was sunk in frozen ground, and this cold-storage treatment had preserved it in an extraordinary manner. If the Siberian natives who discovered it partially buried in alluvial deposit had not uncovered it, so that the sun was able to play on the carcase and produced decay, this wonderful primeval monster might almost have been got out whole. As it was the frozen ground had so kept the remains that Dr. Herz found well-preserved fragments of food between the teeth, and the remains of a hearty meal in the stomach. There is no doubt that the Mammoth fell into the crevice or pit and damaged himself so much in the fall that he could not crawl out. One cannot help feeling some relief that he died after a short death-struggle. A good deal of the very old meat of this body was eagerly eaten by the native dogs. CHAPTER XXIV THE KINGDOM OF MAN The greatest zoologist of his time, Sir E. Ray Lankester, has said that man has differed from all other inhabitants of the animal kingdom in being able to resist the pressure of circumstances which have altered and destroyed them. In all the cases of the animals which we have been considering, these creatures have been limited by the conditions of geography; they have been killed by extremes of heat and cold; they have been subject to starvation if one kind of diet were unobtainable; and they have constantly altered in shape, structure, and appearance, according to the requirements of the new conditions in which they found themselves. But man's mind and will have enabled him to cross rivers and oceans by rafts and boats, to clothe himself against cold, to shelter himself from heat and rain, to prepare an endless variety of food by fire, and to increase and multiply as no other animal without change of form, and without submitting to the terrible axe of selection wielded by ruthless circumstance over all other living things on this globe. "And as he has more and more obtained this control over his surroundings, he has expanded that unconscious protective attitude towards his mature offspring which natural selection had already favoured and established among the mammals into a conscious and larger love for his tribe, his race, his nationality, and his kind. He has developed speech, the power of communicating, and, above all, of recording from generation to generation his thought and knowledge. He has formed communities, built cities, and set up empires; and at every step of his progress man has receded farther and farther from the ancient rule exercised by nature over the lower animals."