intercepting sewers now in progress, but  the plan
appeared to be a sealed book to him, and the
discussion of it seemed to make his head ache.
Thanking him, therefore, for the information he
had given me, I turned my back, to some extent,
upon the old works and the old workpeople,
and proceeded to make an inspection of the
new ones.

ELEPHANTS, FOSSIL AND MUSICAL.

THERE are three species of elephants, and not
two only, as commonly represented—the African,
the Asian, and the European. These three species
are distinguished from each other by several
specific characteristics, but chiefly by the formation
of their teeth. The forests of the regions
now called Europe, were roamed by herds of
elephants, of a species known at present only
from their fossil remains. Whether they perished
when the climate changed, or with the forests
which provided them with food and shelter,
is a question requiring discussion and solution.
When the ancestors of the present races of
Europeans, first discovered, a few centuries since,
the bones of gigantic mammals, they fancied
they had discovered the remains of a race of
Titans, the giants who had fought the gods.
The bones of a huge mammal having been dug
up in Dauphiny, were actually exhibited in
Paris as those of Teutobochus Rex, the king
of the Cimbri, furnishing indisputable proofs
of the lamentable degeneracy of the modern
Gauls.

During the course of the eighteenth century,
however, the ice of Siberia revealed a rhinoceros
with preserved eyelids, and an elephant the
pupils of whose eyes were still discernible. The
curiosity of the men who live to discuss, and
inquire, and obtain knowledge, was greatly
excited by this discovery; and they created a new
science, the knowledge of ancient animals, or
the history of life upon the globe. This they
did, whilst demanding how the remains of
animals, the like of which are now found only
among the flame breezes of Asia and Africa,
came among the icy mountains and frozen
seas of Siberia. Gmelin supposed that the
elephants had been driven northward by storms
and floods, and when there, caught in
snowdrifts, and frozen in perpetual ice. Buffon
conjectured that the north having become
gradually colder, the great mammals had migrated
southward. Cuvier argued that the same sudden
catastrophe had killed the animals and
preserved their remains. La Place, observing that
the Siberian elephants were covered with much
wool and long hair, concluded that they had
been adapted for a cold or temperate climate;
and Cuvier yielded somewhat to the opinion of
La Place; and Professor Owen, having studied
the teeth of elephants more minutely than
anybody else, has powerfully continued the conjecture
of La Place. The layers, plates, scales, or
laminæ, crowning the teeth of the Asian elephant,
resemble narrow ribbons festooned at the edges;
those of the African, look like lozenges; the
teeth of the fossil elephant, although ribbon-like
and festooned, have thinner and more numerous
layers, with thinner and less festooned
intercepting lines of enamel. "Elephants," observes
Professor Owen, "possessing molar teeth of a
highly complicated and very peculiar structure,
alone crunch the branches of trees, the vertical
enamel plates of their huge grinders enabling
them to pound the tough vegetable tissue, and
fit it for deglutition. No doubt the foliage is
the more tempting, as it is the most succulent
part of the boughs devoured; but the relation
of the complex molars to the comminution of
the coarser vegetable substance is unmistakable.
Now, if we find in an extinct elephant the same
peculiar principle of construction of the molar
teeth, arising from a greater number of triturating
plates, and a greater proportion of the dense
enamel, the inference is plain that the ligneous
fibre must have entered in a larger proportion
into the food of such extinct species. Forests
of hardy trees and shrubs still grow upon the
frozen soil of Siberia, and skirt the banks of the
Lena as far north as latitude sixty degrees. In
Europe, arboreal vegetation extends ten degrees
nearer the pole, and the mammoth might have
derived subsistence from the leafless branches
of trees in regions covered during a part of the
year with snow."

After Professor Owen has thus confirmed La
Place, we can scarcely be deemed over bold in
calling the fossil elephant the European species.
Judging from the localities in which his remains
are found, the mammoth (Elephus primogenius)
must have ranged over all the north of Europe.
They are uncommon neither in France nor in
Germany, nor in Great Britain. Teeth,
unrubbed and unworn, have been found in the
Elephants' Bed, near Brighton, and tusks
discovered between Edinburgh and Selkirk were
carved into chessmen. But the best remains
are found preserved in ice. As the very pupils
of the eyes of the mammoth have been found
preserved with his flesh, still in a condition
which obtained the approbation of canine
gastronomers, the period of his extinction need not
be so remote as has been imagined. As man
came northward he cleared the land of the
forests, and deprived the elephants of the Ieaves,
twigs, and branches of trees which nourished them,
and of the deep and dark recesses which formed
their habitats. Man, the exterminator, destroys
every animal which he finds or fancies noxious
to him; and the mammoth, gradually driven to
more and more ungenial climes, would become
the victim of a wet summer, a hard winter, and
a change of climate such as has repeatedly
occurred from geological and astronomical
causes.

Droves of elephants, then, have lived where
we live. Surely there is evidence enough to
warrant this supposition, and we had almost
said, support this conclusion. When the first
men came from Asia to Europe, they most
probably witnessed scenes such as are observed and
described by Mr. Pringle at the Cape of Good
Hope, and by Sir Stamford Raffles in India.