Page:The Zoologist, 3rd series, vol 1 (1877).djvu/169

Rh that, but for the peculiar construction of the grinders and the curling tusks of the Mammoth, it would be difficult to distinguish them. Allowing, therefore, for influences before referred to, we may assume that the naked skin and other differences observable in the Asiatic Elephant may be due to conditions under which the animal had lived for long ages; indeed, there appears to be a growing belief among naturalists that the Mammoth might have been the progenitor of the Elephant of Asia. In the case of the Ancient Elephant there is also an agreement, though less marked, in its teeth and bones with those of the African Elephant; but we must wait for further discoveries in the soils and caverns of Southern Europe and Asia before any more exact relationships between the living and extinct species can be determined.

that inhabited Britain possessed characters which in the opinion of many naturalists warrant their division into two or three species, all of which carried two horns, like the animals now living in Sumatra and Africa, as distinguished from other species.

—so named from having a bony septum to its nose—was very plentifully distributed over England after the glacial period. It is the same animal which the Russian naturalist Pallas found frozen and entire, in 1771, in the sands of the river Viloni, in Siberia. The body was clad in long shaggy hair, and the flesh and skin were for the most part preserved, from constantly lying in frozen soil—how long, who is to say? At all events, no native traditions speak of the animal. Its remains (chiefly teeth) have turned up in about sixty different localities in England, and are usually associated, as in Siberia, with remains of the equally hirsute Mammoth. Its nearest living ally is the African or Two-horned Rhinoceros, which stands nearly five feet in height, with a length of eleven feet. To judge by the measurements of the individual discovered by Pallas, the above is a somewhat smaller animal than the extinct Tichorhine species.

Another fossil species (or variety, as some consider it) has been named the and is distinguished from the last-named by a more slender body, as evidenced by its bones and teeth. The third form, named the is distinguished by the presence of