The Testimony of the Rocks: or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed
John Stuart Mill · en
In the Middle or Miocene Tertiary, pachyderms, though of a wholly
different type from their predecessors, are still the prevailing forms.
The Dinotherium, one of the greatest quadrupedal mammals that ever
lived, seems to have formed a connecting link in this middle age between
the Pachydermata and the Cetaceæ. Each ramus of the under jaw, which in
the larger specimens are fully four feet in length, bore at the
symphysis a great bent tusk turned downwards, which appears to have been
employed as a pickaxe in uprooting the aquatic plants and liliaceous
roots on which the creature seems to have lived. The head, which
measured about three feet across,--a breadth, sufficient, surely, to
satisfy the demands of the most exacting phrenologist,--was provided
with muscles of enormous strength, arranged so as to give potent effect
to the operations of this strange tool. The hinder part of the skull
not a little resembled that of the Cetaceæ; while, from the form of the
nasal bones, the creature was evidently furnished with a trunk like the
elephant. It seems not improbable, therefore, that this bulkiest of
mammaliferous quadrupeds constituted, as I have said, a sort of uniting
tie between creatures still associated in the human mind, from the
circumstance of their massive proportions, as the greatest that swim the
sea or walk the land,--the whale and the elephant. The Mastodon, an
elephantoid animal, also furnished, like the elephant, with tusks and
trunk, but marked by certain peculiarities which constitute it a
different genus, seems in Europe to have been contemporary with the
Dinotherium; but in North America (the scene of its greatest numerical
development) it appears to belong to a later age. In height it did not
surpass the African elephant, but it considerably exceeded it in
length,--a specimen which could not have stood above twelve feet high
indicating a length of about twenty-five feet: it had what the elephants
want,--tusks fixed in its lower jaw, which the males retained through
life, but the females lost when young; its limbs were proportionally
shorter, but more massive, and its abdomen more elongated and slim; its
grinder teeth too, some of which have been known to weigh from seventeen
to twenty pounds, and their cusps elevated into great mammæ-like
protuberances, to which the creature owes its name, and wholly differ in
their proportions and outline from the grinders of the elephant. The
much greater remoteness of the mastodonic period in Europe than in
America is a circumstance worthy of notice, as it is one of many facts
that seem to indicate a general transposition of at least the later
geologic ages on the opposite sides of the Atlantic. Groups of
corresponding character on the eastern and western shores of this great
ocean were not contemporaneous in time. It has been repeatedly
remarked, that the existing plants and trees of the United States, with
not a few of its fishes and reptiles, bear in their forms and