cares to visit unless Indian cunning even

it is a mortifying fact that the early explorers in this country generally found welcome and hospitality among the Indians before the white traders had corrupted them. Now it is difficult to find a tribe that a white man with the balance of power on his side. has not proved equal to the duplicity of the white man. You may have heard of the Indian who offered his beaver skins for sale to a trader in olden times in one of our Puritan villages, when the trader was on his way to church. The trader would not purchase then, but in a whisper stated a price. When the church was dismissed the Indian followed the trader home and demanded payment for his skins, but was forced to accept a less price than was first named. The Indian took the money but told an acquaintance that he had discovered the use of the big meeting at the church,-"it was to lower the price of beaver skins."

As a white man I take the side of the pioneer in defence of his family, but I wish the Indians could have been spared much of the degradation brought upon them by bad white men that must eventually end in complete subjection, or extermination.

NOTE. All the figures not otherwise designated, are drawn from memory.

-EDS.

THE TIME OF THE MAMMOTHS.

BY PROF. N. S. SHALER.

WE must ask the reader to go with us into the remote past; back beyond the time when man invaded the primitive forests and disturbed the abundant life which covered the prairies around the great inland seas of our continent; still farther back until we come to a time when very different animals from those now living there, roamed those woods. and fields. We thus come to a time remote when measured

by the usual standards of duration, yet only a geological yesterday. Once such journeys as we propose making were very difficult, and attended with dangers to soul, if not to body, which might well make any but the stout hearted investigator hesitate. But now that the wall, which once divided the preadamic time from the present, has been so frequently breached and trodden over by those bound on expeditions into an even more remote past than that to which we seek to penetrate, we may set out on our journey without fear of meeting with a reception, on our return, which might make us wish that we had stayed among the monsters of that ancient time.

We will not strain the imagination of the reader by asking him to conjure up a picture of land and sea unlike that given by our present continents and oceans. He need not flatten out mountain chains, or dry up river systems, in order to represent to himself a true picture of the theatre which bore the actors of the scenes we are about to describe. Our good old continent was much the same then as now. All the changes which have taken place would fall within the limits of error of the maps of the past few decades. The unceasing agents of change operating through water, have done much work; but a little longer delta to the Mississippi, a somewhat greater projection of Florida to the southward, a lessened area of the great lakes of the north-west, are about all the more important changes which have been accomplished since the time of which we speak.

In order to come in contact with living elephants and mastodons, we need not go so far into the history of our continent as to traverse the glacial period. Long after the time when this great ice envelope shrouded the northern half of this continent, the great pachyderms continued to form the most important feature in the life of our continent. If we wish to go back to the time when these great animals. first came into our fields and forests we must ascend much farther into the past, beyond two or more glacial periods,

with the long intervals of repose between them. During the middle and later tertiary periods elephantine life had its highest development; a half a dozen or more species lived then on the surface of the European continent, and only a portion of the then existing forms may be known to us. The importance of the elephant life of this time may be better estimated by comparing the number of large mammals belonging to any one family now existing in the same area. Only three or four species of the family of cervidæ, to which the common deer belongs, have existed in Europe since the glacial period. Among the bulls not more than two species are known to have lived during the same time. Nor among the large carnivora, the bears or wolves, have the species been more numerous. We must seek among the smaller of the existing mammals, among the squirrels or mice, for the same richness in specific representation as we find among the elephants of the tertiaries. The variety in size and form seems to have been very great; the smallest species was not over three or four feet high, while the largest stood as high as any of our living elephants, towering to the height of ten or twelve feet. We know too little of the geology of the other continents of the old world to say whether this exceeding richness in large elephants at this stage of the earth's history was also found there. We know, however, that India, where one of the two remaining species of elephants lives, was thronged with these animals at this time, and although Africa was probably then separated from the other continents with which it is now closely united by seas of considerable width, it, too, probably bore an abundance of the same life. We do not know the character of the life of the middle tertiary time in North America with anything like the accuracy that we do that of Europe during the same time. The investigations which are to enable us to form a clearly defined picture of the life of that time, on our own continent, are yet to be made. It seems likely, however, that during the time when elephants were so remarkable a feature in the life

of the old world, the new world was inhabited by quite different forms of pachyderms. The beds of the Mauvaises Terres, and neighboring country so astoundingly rich in animal remains, have supplied us with more species of fossil horses than are known from all the rest of the beds of that period. Altogether the middle and later tertiaries of North America have supplied us with the remains of at least ten species of fossil horse-like animals; so that the comparatively unexplored regions of North America have yielded more tertiary horses than all of every age and formation which have been found in other regions.

When we come down to dates nearer to our own time, and only separated therefrom by the last ice period, we find evidences that the European elephantine life still continued, though the species had changed, there being no longer so considerable a number of distinct forms as then existed. We are not yet quite certain whether the elephant remains of Siberia come down to us from a period anterior to the glacial epoch, or whether they were stored away in that frozen soil during or since that time of extreme cold. All analogy with the remains found in other regions, lead us to conclude that these herds of elephants, whose remains are found in such abundance around the mouths of the great rivers of northern Asia which empty into the Arctic Ocean, are contemporaneous with those of the closely allied, if not identical, species found in the peat swamps and morasses of North America. The number of these fossil elephants which are to be found in northern Asia is as remarkable as the condition in which they have been preserved. The ivory which they have left strewn over this region has been for centuries an important article of commerce, a large portion of the Chinese supply being probably derived from this source. There can be no doubt that the elephant life of this region was once as abundant as that which now exists in the jungles of Ceylon, or the southern part of Africa.

The peculiar circumstances under which many of the bod

ies of the Siberian elephants have been preserved, enables us to form an idea of the external form and habits of the creature far more satisfactory in its character than that which we have of any other extinct animal, except a few which have been exterminated by the hand of man.

Generally the geologist is compelled to effect the restoration or rebuilding of the form of the extinct animal from fragments of a skeleton, the gaps of which he must fill by inference, and this conjectural framework is afterwards to be thrown into a more or less imaginary outline of soft, enveloping parts. He is only too thankful if he finds that decay has left him a tolerably fair basis which he may build his labor upon. But in the case of many of the Siberian elephants the preservation is perfect; not only the skeleton, but the whole mass of the soft parts; the external envelope of skin, with its protecting covering of hair; even the delicate and perishable structures of the eye, an organ which so quickly perishes when decay begins to work, are all in an unchanged condition. Nor is the preservation that of form alone; the chemical condition of the body is unchanged, it is still flesh and blood; its imprisonment in the ice of the frozen soil of the Lena delta for an hundred thousand years, more or less, has not perceptibly changed its constitution; animals feed greedily on this flesh which has endured twenty times as long as the historical record. The dogs and wolves gather from afar to the feast whenever one of these bodies is uncovered, and there seems no good reason why those abnormal appetites of Paris, which find a new titillation of the palate in every monstrosity of diet, should not get a sweeter morsel from these preadamic elephants than they have obtained from their choice pieces of the knackers yard. Fortune certainly awaits the next rival of the hois treres Provenceaux, if he will bid for it with elephant steaks from Siberia. The many ingenious inventors, who seek to find a means of preserving substances liable to perish by decay, who are constantly endeavoring to solve the problem of how