ties I will suppose this circumstance equivocal. But, 1, The skeleton of the mammoth (for so the incognitum has been called) bespeaks an animal of six times the cubic volume of the elephant, as Mons. de Buffon has admitted.[1] 2, The grinders are five times as large, are square, and the grinding surface studded with four or five rows of blunt points: whereas those of the elephant are broad and thin, and their grinding surface flat.[2] 3, I have never heard an instance, and suppose there has been none, of the grinder of an elephant being found in America. 4, From the known temperature and constitution of the elephant he could never have existed in those regions where the remains of the mammoth have been found. The elephant is a native only of the torrid zone and its vicinities: if with the assistance of warm apartments and warm clothing he has been preserved in life in the temperate climates of Europe, it has only been for a small portion of what would have been his natural period, and no instance of his multiplication in them has ever been known. But no bones of the mammoth, as I have before observed, have been ever found further South than the salines of the Holston, and they have been found as far North as the Arctic circle. Those, therefore, who are of opinion that the elephant and mammoth are the same, must believe, 1, That the elephant known to us can exist and multiply in the frozen zone; or, 2, That an internal fire may once have warmed those regions, and since abandoned them, of which, however, the globe exhibits no unequivocal indications; or, 3, That the obliquity of the ecliptic, when these elephants lived, was so great as to include within the tropics all those regions in which the bones are found; the tropics being as is before observed, the natural limits of habitation for the elephant. M. de Buffon considers the existence of elephant bones in Northern regions, where the animal itself is no longer found, as one of the leading facts which support his theory, that the earth was once in a liquid state, rendered so by the action of fire, that the process of cooling began at its poles, and pro-
Page:Notes on the State of Virginia (1853).djvu/61
ANIMALS.
45
