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The herd of mammoths was composed of nineteen, led by a monster even of his kind, and men who had been watching them all night and during the forenoon said that the herd was feeding very near the edge of the wood, where it ended on the slope leading to the precipice. There was ice upon the slope and there were chances of a great day's hunting.
Before man the great and prevalent creatures followed one another processionally to extinction; the early monsters of the ancient seas, the clumsy amphibians struggling breathless to the land, the reptiles, the theriomorpha and the dinosaurs, the bat-winged reptiles of the Mesozoic forests, the colossal grotesque first mammals, the giant sloths, the mastodons and mammoths; it is as if some idle dreamer moulded them and broke them and cast them aside, until at last comes man and seizes the creative wrist that would wipe him out of being again.
A little later in the same Age the horses were similar to those of the present time and of equal size, which proves that the wild horses of the West were not descended from the few lost by the Spanish Invaders. At this time the first lions, camels, mastodons, and mammoths also appeared.
In ages long gone by there were elephants upon the earth or animals resembling elephants as much larger than the existing species as these are superior in size to other quadrupeds. Such were the mammoths and mastodons, the skeletons of which are occasionally found buried beneath the surface of the soil in different parts of the world.
These benevolent mammoths, not content with the duty of bearing a tower of stone with a more than life-sized general balancing on top of it, generously spent their spare time in pouring volumes of water from wrinkled trunks into a huge basin.
They're big tigers an' mammoths an' sech like." "I'm not disputing what you say, Sol, because I don't know anything about it, but if it wasn't for raising an alarm I'd shoot that king wolf there, who is following us so close. I can tell by his eyes that he expects to eat us both." "What kind o' tigers wuz it that Paul said lived long ago, an' growed so monstrous big?" "Saber-toothed."
But the beast's terror at the fire, which was native to its constitution, mastered all its new-bought habits of obedience. From time unknown men have hunted the mammoth in the savage ground, and the mammoth has hunted men; and the men have always used fire as a shield, and mammoths have learned to dread fire as the most dangerous of all enemies.
Neither of these creatures has ever played any considerable part in European affairs. From the disappearance of the last of the mammoths in the closing stages of the Glacial time until the invasions of Italy by Pyrrhus and by Hannibal, elephants were practically unknown in Western Europe.
Here lived enormous elephants called mammoths. As we enter the gallery we see one in front of us, a monstrous creature, who makes the ordinary elephant put behind him to compare with him seem small. But larger still is the head of another behind that again. Can you even imagine a beast that could carry tusks about twelve feet long?
'To be sure she will, uncle, said Owen, 'and we will have an especial corner for you, called "The Claudia," where the little hypocrite shall talk to you of all the druidical remains, and fossil mammoths, that she pretends to be so interested in. 'You had better come and take off your bonnet now, my dear, said Mrs Jonathan to the flushed and shy Gladys.
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