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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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