in the interstices of its teeth, was the signal for the disappearance of their most colossal inhabitant.
The large number of remains of this and of other extinct species of Elephas in this country gave rise to the supposition that they were Elephants brought over by Caesar to aid in the subjugation of these islands. The Rev. J. Coleridge (father of the poet) pointed out that though Caesar in his Commentaries made no mention of any such importation of Elephants, a passage in the Stratagems of Polyaenus expressly mentions that Cassivelaunus was confronted by the Romans with an Elephant clad in a coat of mail, by whose aid the crossing of the Thames was effected. At the time that attention was called to this (1757) it was not popular to hint at the possibility of fossils. So that fact, conveniently historical, served to explain away a difficulty. It is remarkable that the Elephant, common enough of course in Asiatic monuments, actually occurs in English architecture. Mr. Watkins, from whose interesting work (Natural History of the Ancients) a good many of the facts detailed here are drawn, tells us that the church of Ottery St. Mary has an Elephant's head sculptured on one of its pillars. The same ornament appears in Gosberton Church, Lincolnshire. Whether this has anything to do with a reminiscence of formerly existing Elephants is a hard question to answer. In this figure of an Elephant the trunk has a spiral representation, and the trunk of an Elephant is believed by some to be intended by the common "so-called Pictish ornamentation" in Scotland; this spiral alone is to be seen constantly. If it is a reduction of an Elephant to its simplest terms, it is highly interesting as an almost undoubted survival of remembrance of Elephants. For at such a period we cannot use the memories of Crusaders or others who may have visited the East to explain the facts. The sculptured Elephants' heads might conceivably be so explained.
The name Mammoth, thinks Mr. Watkins, may be derivable from the Arabic word Behemoth. He quotes a writer, who first described the beast in 1694, as using the two words indifferently. The Arabs, moreover, were then as they are now great ivory traders; and in the ninth and the two succeeding centuries explored the confines of Siberia, as they now do the forests of Africa, for ivory. The "Behemoth" of Job "eateth grass as an ox.... He moveth his tail like a cedar" (the Hippopotamus has a much more
