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In the forms of his humbler forebears he has himself lived and died myriads of times to make ready the soil that nurses and sustains him to-day. He is a debtor to Cambrian and Silurian times, to the dragons and saurians and mastodons that have roamed over the earth. Indeed, what is there or has there been in the universe that he is not indebted to?

It may be easily understood, therefore, how the vast mastodons, elephants, and other huge animals lost their lives. In their eagerness to drink the saline waters, or lick the salt, those in front, hurrying forward, would have been pressed upon by those behind, and thus, before they were aware of their danger, sank helplessly into the quagmire.

Flowers and trees, birds and fishes, locusts and mastodons, all things, from the tiniest animalcule to man, were there, unmodelled, not even in embryo, their separate existences then only in the mind of God. There, Christian and Saracen, Jew and Gentile, Caucasian and Negro, Hindoo and Pariah, all the now heterogeneous natures which are as oil and water, were blended in one common vapor.

M. Gervais states that the Didelphis crancrivora is found there. It is certain that the West Indies possess some mammifers peculiar to themselves. When America, and especially North America, possessed its elephants, mastodons, horse, and hollow-horned ruminants, it was much more closely related in its zoological characters to the temperate parts of Europe and Asia than it now is.

For instance, mastodons and elephants, when arranged by Dr. Falconer in two series, first according to their mutual affinities and then according to their periods of existence, do not accord in arrangement. The species extreme in character are not the oldest, or the most recent; nor are those which are intermediate in character, intermediate in age.

Under the axle-tree hung, like drapery, a huge chain, worthy of some Goliath of a convict. This chain suggested, not the beams, which it was its office to transport, but the mastodons and mammoths which it might have served to harness; it had the air of the galleys, but of cyclopean and superhuman galleys, and it seemed to have been detached from some monster.

They remind us chiefly of tropical animals; indeed, Tigers, Hyenas, Rhinoceroses, Hippopotamuses, Mastodons, and Elephants had their home in countries which now belong to the Cold Temperate Zone, showing that the climate in these latitudes was much milder then than it is at present. Bones of many of these animals were found in caverns in Germany, France, Italy, and England.

In descending to Tetrabelodon we leave behind us the elephants with hanging unsupported trunk; the lower jaw here is of sufficient length to support the great trunk. When the lower jaw shortened in the later mastodons and elephants the trunk did not shorten too, but remained free and depending, capable of large movement and of grasping with its extremity.

For instance, the species of mastodons and elephants, when arranged by Dr. Falconer in two series in the first place according to their mutual affinities, and in the second place according to their periods of existence do not accord in arrangement. The species extreme in character are not the oldest or the most recent; nor are those which are intermediate in character, intermediate in age.

The seas still swarmed with serpentine monsters of the saurian type, and the firmer lands were peopled by huge animals, mastodons, bears, giant tapirs, mylodons, deinotheriums, and a score of other species too strange for them to recognise by any Earthly likeness, which roamed in great herds through the vast twilit forests and over boundless plains covered with grey-blue vegetation.