The Romance of Natural History.
by Philip Henry Gosse.
Second Series.
I.
THE EXTINCT.
If it is a scene of painful interest, as surely it is to a well-const.i.tuted mind, to stand by and watch the death-struggles of one of the n.o.bler brutes,--a dog or an elephant, for example,--to mark the failing strength, the convulsive throes, the appealing looks, the sobs and sighs, the rattling breath, the glazing eye, the stiffening limbs--how much more exciting is the interest with which we watch the pa.s.sing away of a dying species. For species have their appointed periods as well as individuals: viewed in the infinite mind of G.o.d, the Creator, from the standpoint of eternity, each form, each race, had its proper duration a.s.signed to it--a duration which, doubtless, varied in the different species as greatly as that a.s.signed to the life of one individual animal differs from that a.s.signed to the life of another. As the elephant or the eagle may survive for centuries, while the horse and the dog scarcely reach to twenty years, and mult.i.tudes of insects are born and die within a few weeks, so one species may have a.s.signed to its life, for aught I know, a hundred thousand years as its normal period, and another not more than a thousand. If creation was, with respect to the species, what I have elsewhere proved it was with respect to the individual,[1]--a violent irruption into the cycle of life--then we may well conceive this to have taken place at very varying relative periods in the life-history of the different species;--that is to say, that at a given date, (viz., that of creation) one species might be just completing, _ideally_, its allotted course, another just commencing, and a third attaining its meridian.
Certain it is, that not a few species of animals have died during the present const.i.tution of things. Races, which we know on indubitable evidence to have existed during the dominion of man, have died out, have become extinct, so that not a single individual survives. The entire totality of individuals which const.i.tuted the species, have, in these cases, ceased to be. Some of these seem to have died at a very early era of human history; but others at a comparatively recent period, and some even within our own times. Even within the last twenty years several animals have been taken, of which it is highly probable that not a single representative remains on the earth; while there are others yet again, which we know to be reduced to a paucity so extreme, that their extinction can scarcely be delayed more than a few years at most. Thus we may consider ourselves as standing by the dying-beds of these creatures, with the consciousness that we shall soon see them no more; that the sentence is gone forth against them; that their sands are running to the last grains, and that no effort of ours can materially prolong their existence. The facts from which these conclusions are drawn are highly curious, and I shall endeavour to lay them, with as much brevity as they will allow, before my readers.
On that prochronic hypothesis, by which alone, as I conceive, the facts revealed by geological investigation can be reconciled with the unerring statements of Scripture,--every word of which is truth, the truth of a "G.o.d that cannot lie,"--we may a.s.sume the actual creation of this earth to have taken place at that period which is geologically known as the later Tertiary Era, or thereabout. When, on the third day, "the waters under the heaven were gathered together into one place, and the dry land appeared," it is not necessary to suppose that the form a.s.sumed by the emerging land was immediately that which it now has; we may, on the other hand, I think, a.s.sume as likely, that successive or continuous changes of elevation followed, which have been protracted, perhaps constantly decreasing in extent and force, to the present hour.[2]
Perhaps between the six days" work of Creation and the Noachic Flood, Europe became much altered in outline, and in elevation. It may have been, at first, a great archipelago, agreeing with the epithet by which it is designated in early Scripture, "the Isles,"[3] and by which it was subsequently known for ages. The Pyrenees, the Alps, and the Apennines, already emerged, were slowly uniting, and the Carpathians, the Balkan, the Taurus, and the Caucasus, were uprearing, while the vast regions to the north were still an expanse of open sea. England was probably united with the newly-formed European continent, and embraced Ireland in one great ma.s.s of unbroken land, which stretched far away into the Atlantic. Volcanoes were active in the north of Ireland, and in the west of Scotland, pouring forth those floods of fiery lava which have cooled into the columnar forms seen at the Giant"s Causeway and the Cave of Fingal. Slowly the north of Europe emerged, and the great south-west expanse of Britain sank beneath the sea, leaving, it may be, the large island of Atlantis in mid-ocean, to be submerged by a later catastrophe.
Probably changes very similar were coevally taking place in Asia and North America, while the vast flat alluvial regions of South America were, perhaps, even still more recently formed, and a great Pacific continent was in course of subsidence, of which Australasia and Polynesia are the existing remains.
Such changes of elevation, and of the continuity of land, must effect considerable alterations of climate; and, therefore, it is not surprising to know that, in earliest ages, animals and plants flourished in regions to which they would now be altogether unfitted, and that many races existed then which have since died out; for geological and climatal modifications are among the most easily conceivable causes of the decease of species.
In the great swamps of emerging Germany, and in the, as yet, only half-drained valleys of Switzerland, lurked then the heavy Dinothere.
Huger than the hugest elephant, he carried an enormous body of twenty feet in length, vast and barrel-like, which even his columnar limbs of ten feet long scarcely sufficed to raise from the ground. His uncouth head, elephantine in shape, was furnished with a short proboscis; and two tusks, short and strong, projected from the lower jaw, not curving upward, as in the elephant, but downward, as in the walrus. In the teeming marshes lurked this ungainly beast, half immersed, digging out with his mighty pickaxe-tusks the succulent roots that permeated the soft soil, which his sensitive trunk picked up, and conveyed to his mouth.
On the southern slopes of the slowly-rising Himalayas, already clothed with forests of teak, and palm, and bamboo, revelled the Sivathere, another heavy creature, of the bulk of a rhinoceros, and therefore not more than half equalling the German colossus. He too was a strange subject. With a proportionally enormous head, in form somewhat between that of the elephant and of the rhinoceros, minute sunken piggish eyes, and a short proboscis like that of the tapir, he carried two pairs of dissimilar horns. On the forehead were placed one pair, seated upon bony cores, not unlike those of our short-horn oxen. Behind these there rose another pair, large and ma.s.sive, which were palmated and branching, like those of the fallow-deer, but on a gigantic scale. What sort of a body, and what kind of limbs, furnished the complement of this curiously-compound head, we do not exactly know; but surely it must have been a very remarkable form, as it browsed quietly and blamelessly, among the luxuriant shrubs of those sun-facing slopes.
In the same regions a land Tortoise of enormous bulk, far vaster than the vastest of now existing species, to which that ponderous one which will march merrily away with a ton weight on its back, is a mere pigmy, shook the earth with its waddle, and the forests with its hoa.r.s.e bellowing. Broad roads, like our highways, were beaten by it through the jungle, along which it periodically travelled to the cool springs, leisurely sauntering, and tarrying to munch the fleshy gourds and cactuses that bordered its self-made track.
The plains of Siberia, stretching away towards the Arctic Ocean, sheltered countless hosts of huge pachydermatous quadrupeds. A species of Rhinoceros, not less bulky than those of the present age, roamed to the very verge of the Icy Sea; its hide, tough and leathery, was dest.i.tute of folds, but was clothed with tufts of rigid gray hair,--an ornament which is denied to our existing degenerates. Two horns, the front one of unusual ma.s.siveness and length, were seated, as in several of the African kinds, one behind the other, and were wielded by a head of great strength and development.
More remarkable still was that great hairy Elephant, called the Mammoth, which appears to have swarmed in those cold plains by myriads.
Of equal dimensions to the Indian species of the present age, this denizen of the north had far more enormous curving tusks, and instead of the naked hide of those we are familiar with, his body was encased in black hair, with a thick under stratum of red curled wool, and bore a long mane on the ridge of the neck.
There was, at the same time, a quadruped, nearly allied to the elephants, but differing from them in some technical characters. With a body equally bulky, but considerably longer, it had shorter limbs, a broader head, small tusks in the lower, as well as large curving ones in the upper jaw, and probably a trunk intermediate between the elephant"s and the tapir"s. Truly cosmopolite as this great Mastodon was, for we dig up his bones from all parts of the world, he had his head-quarters in North America, where, from his dimensions and his numbers, he must have formed a very characteristic feature of the primeval swamps and forests. There, with his tusks, he grubbed up the young trees, whose juicy roots he ground down with his great mammillary molar teeth, or chewed up to a pulp the sapwood of the recent branches and spicy twigs.
And ever and anon he would resort to the broad saline marshes,--the "Licks," as they are now called,--to lick up the crystallised salt on their margins, so grateful to all herbivorous quadrupeds. Here, in his eagerness to gratify his palate with the pungent condiment, he would press farther and farther into the treacherous quagmire, till he began to sink, and then, in his terror, he would plunge and flounder, getting more and more deeply bemired, till at length he could struggle no more, and the bog would close over him, and he would be no more seen till some spectacled geologist of this nineteenth century, note-book in hand, would go and dig up his remains, marvelling at the freshness with which they had been preserved in the antiseptic peat.
But let us look at South America, where, as the great back-bone chain of the Andes is being elevated out of the sea, the torrents and cataracts are pouring down from its sides immense quant.i.ties of crumbled rock and pasty mud, which, deposited upon the vast tabular field, brought by the upheaving just to the level of the sea, forms that grand alluvial plain unequalled on the face of the globe for extent, which is clothed with the mighty forests of Guiana and Brazil, or with the tall gra.s.s and thistles of the Pampas. The torrents still fall; and, meandering through this glorious plain, unite and form the most majestic of rivers, ever depositing the rich alluvium, and thus sensibly augmenting, to this day, the breadth of their n.o.ble continent, and their own length.
Strange creatures riot here in these primal ages. The young land, hot and moist,--moist with the unevaporated water of the depositing rivers, and hot with the influence of the submarine volcano which is lifting it, as well as with the beams of the tropical sun,--brings forth from its steaming bosom, the most gigantic trees in the most profuse luxuriance.
And animal life teems too, in this riant vegetation. Millions of insects,--ants, and termites, and beetles,--are busy at work upon the trunks of the great trees, eating them down, and swarming in their immense populous nests, beyond all imaginings. Surely they will soon eat up the entire forest, dense and rapid as it grows, and there will be nothing left but cities of insects. No fear! See those great waddling beasts[4] with stout short legs, and enormous hoof-like claws so bent inward that the creatures are obliged to walk on the edge of their paws,--they are equally busy with the insects, tearing apart with their powerful claws the earthy nests as fast as they are built, and devouring the makers themselves by wholesale. Here is a wonderful creature, a vast armadillo, with a body as big as a rhinoceros, covered with a convex oval shield, formed of hexagonal plates accurately fitted to each other.
See how he approaches a fallen tree, which his unerring instinct tells him is perforated through and through, and filled with the swarming millions of ants; with his powerful jaws he munches up the entire ma.s.s; the thin and papery part.i.tions of the dusty wood are ground to powder, and the ants are licked in and chewed into a black pulp between those curious cylinders of teeth.
But lo! here are mightier creatures yet! See the vast Mylodon, the Scelidothere, and the still more colossal Megathere. Ponderous giants these! The very forests seem to tremble under their stately stride.
Their immense bulk preponderates behind, terminating in a tail of wonderful thickness and solidity: the head is mean and awakens no terror; the eye lacks l.u.s.tre and threatens no violence, though the whole form betokens vast power, and the stout limbs are terminated by the same stout, inbent, sharp hoof-claws. One of them approaches that wide-spreading locust-tree; he gazes up at the huge mud-brown structures that resemble hogsheads affixed to the forks of the branches, and he knows that the luscious termites are filling them to overflowing. His lips water at the tempting sight; have them he must. But how? that heavy sternpost of his was never made for climbing; yet see! he rears himself up against the tree; is he about to essay the scaling? Not he: he knows his powers better. He gives it one embrace; one strong hug; as if to test its thickness and hold upon the earth. Now he is digging away below, scooping out the soft soil from between the roots,--and it is marvellous to note how rapidly he lays them bare with those great shovel-like claws of his. Now he rears himself again; straddles wide on his hind feet, fixing the mighty claws deep in the ground; plants himself firmly on his huge tail, as on the third foot of a tripod, and once more grasps the tree. The enormous hind quarters, the limbs and the loins, the broad pelvis, the thick spinal cord supplying abundant nervous energy to the swelling muscles, inserted in the ridged and keeled bones, all come into play, as a _point d"appui_ for the Herculean effort. "And now conceive the ma.s.sive frame of the Megathere convulsed with the mighty wrestling, every vibrating fibre reacting upon its bony attachment with the force of a hundred giants: extraordinary must be the strength and proportions of the tree, if, when rocked to and fro, to right and left, in such an embrace, it can long withstand the efforts of its a.s.sailant."[5] It yields; the roots fly up; the earth is scattered wide upon the surrounding foliage; the tree comes down with a thundering crash, cracking and snapping the great boughs like gla.s.s; the frightened insects swarm out at every orifice; but the huge beast is in upon them; with his sharp hoofs he tears apart the crusty walls of the earth-nests, and licks out their living contents, fat pupae, eggs and all, rolling down the sweet morsels, half sucking, half chewing, with a delighted gusto that repays him for all his mighty toil.
While the heavy giant is absorbed in his juicy breakfast, see, there lounges along his neighbour, the Macrauchen. Equally ma.s.sive, equally heavy, equally vast, equally peaceful, the stranger resembles a huge rhinoceros elevated on much loftier limbs; but his most remarkable feature is an enormously long neck, like that of the camel, but carried to the alt.i.tude of that of the giraffe. Thus he thrusts his great muzzle into the very centre of the leafy trees, and gathering with his prehensile and flexible lip the succulent twigs and foliage, he too finds abundance of food for his immense body, in the teeming vegetation, without intruding upon the supply of his fellows.
And what enormous ma.s.s is suddenly thrust up out of the quiet water of yonder igaripe? A hoa.r.s.e, hollow grunt, as it comes up, tells us that it is alive, and now we discern that it is the head of an animal--the Toxodon. Half hidden as it is under the shadow of the fan-palms, and the broad, arrowy leaves of the great arums that grow out of the lake, we see the little piggish eyes, set far up in the great head, and wide apart, peeping with a curious union of stupidity and shrewdness; the immense muzzle and lips; the broad cheeks armed with stiff projecting bristles; and, as the creature opens its cavernous mouth to seize a floating gourd, an extraordinary array of incurving teeth, strangely bowed so as to make a series of arches of immense power. Now, with his strong front teeth, he tears up the great fleshy arum-roots from the clay of the bank, and grinds them to pulp; and now, with another grunt, the vast bristly head sinks beneath the water, and we see it no more.
Hundreds of other creatures are straying around,--sloths, bats, and monkeys, and birds of gay plumage, on the trees; ant-eaters and cavies, lizards and snakes, on the ground; b.u.t.terflies and humming-birds hovering in the air; tapirs and turtles and crocodiles in the waters;--but these are matters of course:--we are only thinking of such as have pa.s.sed away and left no descendants to perpetuate their forms to our own times.
Away to the great Austral land--in our day minished to the insular Australia and New Zealand and a few satellite isles--but then, in the morning of creation, possibly stretching far to the north and on either hand, so as to include the scattered groups of Polynesia in one great continent, and even to reach so far as Madagascar on the west. This was the region of gigantic fowls, and of marsupial quadrupeds. Kangaroos of eight or nine feet in stature leaped over the primeval bush, and wombats and dasyures of elephantine bulk burrowed in the hill sides, and great lion-like beasts prowled about the plains. But surely the most characteristic feature of the scene was impressed by the birds! Vast struthious birds, which would have looked down with supreme contempt on the loftiest African ostrich, whose limb-bones greatly exceeded in bulk those of our dray horses, whose three-toed feet made a print in the clay some eighteen inches long, and whose proud heads commanded the horizon from an elevation of twelve feet above the ground,--terrible birds, whose main development of might was in the legs and feet, being utterly dest.i.tute of the least trace of wings--these strode swiftly about the rank ferny brakes, possessing a conscious power of defence in the back stroke of their muscular feet, and fearless of man or beast, mainly nocturnal in their activity, concealing themselves by day in the recesses of the dense forests, where the majestic trees were interwoven with cable-like climbers, or couching in the midst of tall reeds and aroideous plants that margined the great swampy lakes of these regions.
But what of our own land? What of these distant isles of the Gentiles in that early day, when the enterprising sons of Cain, migrating from the already straitened land of Nod, were pushing their advancing columns, with arts and arms, in all directions over the young earth? Did any of them reach to the as yet insular Europe, settling themselves along the margins of its deep gulfs and draining basins? Perhaps they did, and even explored the utmost limits of the great Atlantic island, on the remains of which we live. What did they find here? A land of mountain and valley, of plain and down, of lake and river, of bog and fell, of forest and field, in some features much as now: where the oak, and elm, and ash covered great tracts, and the birch and fir clothed the hills; but where the yew and the laurel grew side by side with the custard-apple and the fan-palm, and the ground was overrun with trailers of the gourd and melon kind, but where gra.s.ses were few and scarce, the exquisite order _Rosaceae_, with its beautiful flowers and grateful fruit, was rarely seen, and the aromatic _l.a.b.i.atae_--the thyme, and mint, and sage--were as yet unknown.
And the beasts that already tenanted this fair land were for bulk and power worthy of the domain. The Dinothere and the Mastodon wallowed and browsed where great London now crowds its princely palaces. Through the greenwood shades of the forests of oak wandered hippopotamuses and rhinoceroses of several kinds, the long-tusked mammoth, and two or three species of horses. Two gigantic oxen--a bison and a urus--roamed over the fir-clad hills of Scotland, and a curious flat-headed ox, of small size and minute horns, made Ireland its peculiar home. That island, too, was the metropolis of a colossal fallow-deer, whose remains, ticketed as those of the Irish Elk, astonish us in our museums. It stood seven feet in height at the withers, and waved its branching antlers, eleven feet wide, twelve feet and upwards above the ground;[6] yet its magnificent stature could not preserve it from a not infrequent fate, that of becoming intombed in the deep bogs of its native isle. Britain had, moreover, a stag of scarcely less gigantic proportions, with the reindeer of the north, and the smaller kinds with which we are now familiar.
All these herbivores, and numberless smaller genera, some now extinct, some surviving, were kept in check by powerful predatory tyrants, for whose representatives we must now look to the jungles of India or the burning karroos of Southern Africa. The Lion and the Tiger stalked over these isles, and a terrible tiger-like creature, the Machairode, of even superior size and power to the scourge of the Bengal jungle, with curved and saw-edged canine-teeth, hung upon the flanks of the cervine and bovine herds, and sprang upon the fattest of them. Then, too, there was a vast Bear, huger and mightier than the fearful grizzly bear of America, which haunted caves, and prowling around forced down with its horrid paws the s.h.a.ggy bull, and broke his stout neck by main force, and dragged the body home to devour at leisure. And many of these caves, the holes and chasms of the limestone districts, were inhabited by a gigantic species of Hyena, which seems to have existed in great numbers, so that the caverns are strewn all over, from end to end, with thousands of teeth and disjointed bones, both of the hyenas themselves and of the other carnivores; shewing that there they lived and died in successive generations; and, mainly, of other creatures, of very varied species, great and small, most of them cracked, and crushed, and gnawed, shewing the plain marks of the powerful conical teeth of those obscene nocturnal animals.
Thus I have endeavoured to draw a picture, vague and imperfect, I know, of some of the more remarkable and prominent features of the primeval earth, limiting the sketch to those forms which we know only by their fossil remains. In endeavouring to paint their contour and general appearance, and still more their habits and instincts, conjecture must be largely at work--a conjecture, however, which takes for its basis the anatomical exigencies of the osseous structure, and the a.n.a.logy of existing creatures the most nearly related to the fossil.
These forms, many of them so huge and uncouth, are well known as having tenanted various regions of the earth during what is known as the Tertiary Era, in its later periods. They certainly do not exist in those regions now. When did their life--their species-life--terminate? I have been a.s.suming that they were upon the earth, as living sentient beings, in the earliest age of what we call the historic period--that is, according to the chronology of the Word of G.o.d, which must be true, within the last six thousand years. This a.s.sumption is so heterodox, that unsupported by evidence, it would be generally rejected; let us then inquire what evidence there is that man was an inhabitant of the globe contemporaneously with these huge giants of the b.e.s.t.i.a.l creation.
I do not pretend to offer positive evidence concerning the synchronism of _all_ the animals I have been describing with man; but, as there is no doubt that they were all contemporaneous, _inter se_, if we can attain to good grounds for concluding his co-existence with _some_ of them, it may be no unfair presumption that the case was so with the others.
And first, with respect to the _Colossochelys Atlas_, that vast fossil land tortoise of the Sewalik hills, in the north of India, whose carapace may have covered an area of twelve or fifteen feet in diameter, and whose entire length, as in walking, when head and tail were protruded, could not have been much less than thirty feet. The discoverers of this interesting relic, Dr Falconer and Major Cauntley, have discussed the question of its probable cessation of existence with some care; and they have come to the conclusion "that there are fair grounds for entertaining the belief, as probable, that the _Colossochelys Atlas_ may have lived down to an early period of the human epoch, and become extinct since." This they infer on two grounds: first, from the fact that, in the same strata, which are not limited to the Sewalik hills, but extend, with the remains of this immense tortoise, all over the great Indian area, from Ava to the Gulf of Cambay, other tortoises, crocodiles, &c., which were contemporary with the _Colossochelys_, have survived to the present time; and, secondly, from mythologic and cosmogonic traditions of many eastern nations, having reference to a tortoise of such gigantic size as to be a.s.sociated in the current fables with an elephant.[7]
Elian, the Greek naturalist, quoting Megasthenes, a still older authority, who resided several years in India, and who collected a good deal of interesting information concerning the country, reports that in the sea around Ceylon there were found tortoises of such enormous dimensions that huts were made of their sh.e.l.ls, each sh.e.l.l being fifteen cubits (or twenty-two feet) long; so that several people were able to find comfortable shelter under it from the rain and sun.[8] And both Strabo and Pliny[9] a.s.sert that the Chelonophagi, who inhabited the sh.o.r.es of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, converted the enormous sh.e.l.ls of the turtles which they caught into roofs for their houses and boats for their little voyages. It has been suggested that the _Colossochelys_ may have given origin to these statements; but I rather think the great sea-turtles of the genus _Chelone_ are referred to, the convex sh.e.l.ls of which are known in our own day to reach to a length of eight feet or upwards.
The circ.u.mstances attending the discovery of the rhinoceros and elephant of Siberia are very curious and interesting; since of them we have not the fossilised skeletons, but the carcases preserved in a fresh state, as if just dead, with (in one case) the flesh upon the bones in an eatable state, and actually forming the food of dogs and wolves, the skin entire, and covered with fur, and even the eyes so perfectly preserved that the pupils could be distinctly seen.
In 1771, in the frozen gravelly soil of Wilhuji, in the northern part of Siberia, an animal was found partially exposed. It was twelve feet in length; its body was enveloped in a skin which had the thickness and firmness of sole-leather, but was dest.i.tute of folds. Short hair, strongly planted in the pores of the skin, grew on the face in tufts; it was rigid in texture, and of a grey hue, with here and there a black bristle, larger and stiffer than the rest. Short ash-grey hair was observed to clothe the legs, in moderate profusion. The eyelids and eyelashes were still visible; the remains of the brain were still in the cavity of the skull, and the flesh of the body, in a putrefying condition, was still beneath the skin. On the nose there were indications of a horn having been seated, around which the integument had formed a sort of fold.
Thus the creature was known to be a Rhinoceros, and the head and feet were lifted, and conveyed to St Petersburg, where they are still preserved in the Imperial Museum. Men of science soon remarked that in very many points this specimen differed from any species now known; and, indeed, a hairy rhinoceros was, in itself, an anomaly. Subsequent investigations have revealed that the same species, known as _Rhinoceros tichorhinus_, inhabited Siberia in great numbers, and is now extinct.
Nearly thirty years afterwards a still more interesting revelation occurred. The sh.o.r.es of the Icy Ocean had yielded a vast number of tusks, not distinguishable from those of the known elephants, and capable of being worked up by ivory-manufacturers, so that they occupied a well-recognised place in the commercial markets, and they const.i.tute to this day the princ.i.p.al supply of the Russian ivory-turners. A fisherman living at the mouth of the Lena, being one day engaged in collecting tusks, saw among some ice-blocks an uncouth object. The next year he observed it still further exposed, and in the following season, 1801, he saw that it was an enormous animal, having great tusks, one of which, with the entire side of the carcase, projected from the frozen ma.s.s. He knew it to be a _Mammoth_, for so the fossil elephants were called, and observed it with interest. The next season was so cold that no change took place; but in 1803, the melting of the ice proceeded so far that the gigantic animal fell down from the cliff entire, and was deposited on the sand beneath. The following season the fisherman, Schumachoff, cut out the tusks, which" he sold for fifty rubles, and two years after this the scene was visited by Mr Adams, in the service of the Imperial Court, who has given an interesting account of his observations, made, it must be remembered, in the seventh year after the first discovery:--
"I found the Mammoth," observes this gentleman, "still in the same place, but altogether mutilated ... the Jakutski of the neighbourhood having cut off the flesh, with which they fed their dogs during the scarcity. Wild beasts, such as white bears, wolves, wolverines, and foxes, also fed upon it, and the traces of their footsteps were seen around. The skeleton, almost entirely devoid of its flesh, remained whole, with the exception of one fore-leg. The head was covered with a dry skin; one of the ears, well preserved, was furnished with a tuft of hairs. All these parts have necessarily been injured in transporting them a distance of 7330 miles (to St Petersburg); but the eyes have been preserved, and the pupil of one can still be distinguished.
"The Mammoth was a male, with a long mane on the neck. The tail and proboscis were not preserved. The skin, of which I possess three-fourths, is of a dark-grey colour, covered with reddish wool and black hairs; but the dampness of the spot, where it had lain so long, had in some degree destroyed the hair. The entire carcase, of which I collected the bones on the spot, was nine feet four inches high, and sixteen feet four inches long, without including the tusks, which measured nine feet six inches along the curve. The distance from the base or root of the tusk to the point is three feet seven inches. The two tusks together weighed three hundred and sixty pounds, English weight, and the head alone four hundred and fourteen pounds.
"I next detached the skin of the side on which the animal had lain, which was well preserved. This skin was of such extraordinary weight that ten persons found difficulty in transporting it to the sh.o.r.e. After this I dug the ground in different places, to ascertain whether any of its bones were buried, but princ.i.p.ally to collect all the hairs which the white bears had trod into the ground while devouring the flesh.
Although this was difficult from the want of instruments, I succeeded in collecting more than a pood (thirty-six pounds) of hair. In a few days the work was completed, and I found myself in possession of a treasure which amply recompensed me for the fatigues and dangers of the journey, and the considerable expenses of the enterprise.... The escarpment of ice was thirty-five to forty toises high; and, according to the report of the Tungusians, the animal was, when they first saw it, seven toises below the surface of the ice, &c. On arriving with the Mammoth at Borchaya, our first care was to separate the remaining flesh and ligaments from the bones, which were then packed up. When I arrived at the Jakutsk, I had the good fortune to repurchase the tusks, and from thence expedited the whole to St Petersburg. The skeleton is now in the Museum of the Academy, and the skin still remains attached to the head and feet. A part of the skin, and some of the hair of this animal were sent by Mr Adams to Sir Joseph Banks, who presented them to the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. The hair is entirely separated from the skin, excepting in one very small part, where it still remains attached. It consists of two sorts, common hair and bristles, and of each there are several varieties, differing in length and thickness.
That remaining fixed on the skin is of the colour of the camel, an inch and a-half long, very thick-set, and curled in locks. It is interspersed with a few bristles about three inches long, of a dark-reddish colour.
Among the separate parcels of hair are some rather redder than the short hair just mentioned, about four inches; and some bristles nearly black, much thicker than horse hair, and from twelve to eighteen inches long.
The skin, when first brought to the Museum, was offensive; it is now quite dry and hard, and where most compact, is half-an-inch thick. Its colour is the dull black of the living elephants."[10]
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 mult.i.tudes 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 a.s.sociated 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 lat.i.tudes, 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.
I do not attach much importance to the traditions of the Siberians, that the tusks and skeletons which they find belonged to a large subterraneous animal, which could not bear the light; nor to those of the Chinese, respecting a similar burrowing quadruped of prodigious bulk, which they call, by a sort of irony, _tyn-schu_, or the mouse that hides himself. The fables may have easily been formed from the observation of the fossil bones, and do not necessarily imply any memory of the living original.
The two examples of the exhumation of _Pachydermata_ in a fresh state, which I have given in detail, are by no means the only cases that have occurred. It is the universally-received belief throughout Siberia, that Mammoths have been found with the flesh quite fresh and filled with blood; probably meaning that the animal juices flowed when thawed.
Isbrand Ides mentions a head on which the flesh, in a decaying state, was present; and a frozen leg, as large as the body of a man; and Jean Bernhard Muller speaks of a tusk, the cavity of which was filled with a substance which resembled coagulated blood.