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Updated: June 19, 2025
Arthur, with his usual curiosity, wanted to be told "all about it," and I with my usual desire to teach the searcher after knowledge even of little things though a mammoth is scarcely a "little thing" briefly gave him some insight of the subject, running over the differences between the mastodontine and the elephantine mammoth; and then remarked to him, incidentally, that an American mastodon giganteus, found not far from where we stood, over in Missouri, a third of a century before, was now in our British Museum, where I had seen it.
A sort of candied preserve and molasses, expressed from the fruit of the cereus giganteus and agave Americana was found by our party in 1851, as we passed through the Pinal Llano camps and among the Gila tribes, to be most acceptable. The candied preserve was a most excellent substitute for sugar.
How far the lacustrine strata of North America above mentioned may help to lessen this hiatus, and whether some individuals of the Mastodon giganteus may have come down to the confines of the historical period, is a question not so easily answered as might at first sight be supposed.
In size, we have the colossal Cereus giganteus, whose straight stems when old are as firm as iron, and rise with many ascending arms or rear their tall leafless trunks like ships' masts to a height of 60 ft. or 70 ft.
In Mexico, C. giganteus, the most colossal of all Cacti, is found rearing its tall, straight, columnar stems to a height of 60 ft., and branching near the top, "like petrified giants stretching out their arms in speechless pain, whilst others stand like lonely sentinels keeping their dreary watch on the edge of precipices."
Believing we were well out of the range of hostile Indians, I did not object to their going alone. They passed a considerable distance beyond the growth of Cereus giganteus, over a level stretch covered with knee-high bunch-grass and desert weeds, without seeing a hare. Pausing on the brink of a shoal, dry ravine, they stood side by side, and rested the butts of their guns upon the ground.
Others, standing as erect as bushes and trees or tall branchless pillars crowned with magnificent flowers, their prickly armor sparkling, look boldly abroad over the glaring desert, making the strangest forests ever seen or dreamed of. Cereus giganteus, the grim chief of the desert tribe, is often thirty or forty feet high in southern Arizona.
Flocks of mammoths browsed on the plains where, since, the Atlantic has been; the paleotherium, half horse, half tapir, overturned with his tumbling the ant-hills of Montmartre; and the cervus giganteus trembled under the chestnut trees at the growls of the bears of the caverns, who made the dog of Beaugency, three times as big as a wolf, yelp in his den.
On the same day, he came to a point, which proved to be the very eastern extremity of Kerguelen's Land. In a large bay, near this point, there was a prodigious quantity of sea-weed, some of which is of a most extraordinary length. It seemed to be the same kind of vegetable production that Sir Joseph Banks had formerly distinguished by the appellation of fucus giganteus.
If this be so, the whole derangement, although Pleistocene, may have been anterior to the human epoch, or rather to the earliest date to which the existence of man has as yet been traced back. Post-glacial Strata containing Remains of Mastodon giganteus in North America. Scarcity of Marine Shells in Glacial Drift of Canada and the United States.
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