To me this narrative possesses an intense interest, and I have gazed with great curiosity on the bit of dried and blackened leather that is preserved in the Museum in Lincoln's-Inn-Fields, knowing it to have presented the primal freshness of life within the present century. I cannot help thinking that both the rhinoceros and this elephant roamed over the plains of Siberia, not only since the creation of man, but even since the Deluge. The freshness of their state shews that the freezing up of their carcases must have been sudden, and immediate upon death. What supposition so natural as that, perhaps in a blinding snowstorm, they slipped into a crevice in the ice-cliff, were snowed up instantly, and thus preserved by the antiseptic power of frost to this age? The glaciers of the north may hold multitudes more of these and kindred creatures, some of which may yet be disinterred, or thawed out, and may lift yet more the curtain which so tantalisingly covers the conditions of their life-history. These two huge Pachyderms are certainly extinct now; yet their remains, scattered over so vast an area, are everywhere associated with those of other animals which were indubitably contemporary with them, and whose species-life is continued to our own times. Some of these, as the great bear and the musk-ox of the sub-polar regions, we know to be in the habit of migrating northward in spring, and southward in autumn. That no lack of suitable food would be found, even in such high latitudes, for browsing quadrupeds, appears from the fact that, even beyond the parallel of 75° north, large birch-trees are found embedded in the cliffs, in abundance sufficient to be largely used as common fuel, and still retaining their woody fibre, their bark, branches, and roots. The climate then was not _greatly_ different from what it is now, when the birch, as a tree, reaches to about 70°. It is interesting to observe that both this elephant and this rhinoceros were inhabitants of England also; and that at the same period as the cavern bear, the hyena, the lion, and the machairode, the baboon, the bison, and the urus, the Irish elk, and the extinct horse; at the same time too, as the reindeer, the stag, the black bear, the wolf and fox, the beaver, the wild cat, the hare, and rabbit, the otter and badger, the wild hog, the rat and mouse, all our present shrews, the mole, the stoat and polecat, the noctule and the horse-shoe bats. And curious it is to note, as we go over this list, how some of the creatures enumerated are long extinct everywhere, some have been long extinct in England, but are still found elsewhere, some have more recently become extinct here, but at different eras, some are nearly extinguished, and some are yet abundant in different degrees.