Part 9

The horse was just as abundant in North America in Pleistocene time as in Europe; but there is no evidence to show that it was contemporary with early man in North America, and, even were this the case, it is generally believed that long before the discovery of America the horse had disappeared. And yet, so plentiful and so fresh are his remains, and so much like those of the mustang, that the late Professor Cope was wont to say that it almost seemed as if the horse _might_ have lingered in Texas until the coming of the white man. And Sir William Flower wrote: "There is a possibility of the animal having still existed, in a wild state, in some parts of the continent remote from that which was first visited by the Spaniards, where they were certainly unknown. It has been suggested that the horses which were found by Cabot in La Plata in 1530 cannot have been introduced."

Still we have not the least little bit of positive proof that such was the case, and although the site of many an ancient Indian village has been carefully explored, no bones of the horse have come to light, or if they have been found, bones of the ox or sheep were also present to tell that the village was occupied long after the advent of the whites. It is also a curious fact that within historic times there have been no wild horses, in the true sense of the word, unless indeed those found on the steppes north of the Sea of Azof be wild, and this is very doubtful. But long before the dawn of history the horse was domesticated in Europe, and Cæsar found the Germans, and even the old Britons, using war chariots drawn by horses--for the first use man seems to have made of the horse was to aid him in killing off his fellow-man, and not until comparatively modern times was the animal employed in the peaceful arts of agriculture. The immediate predecessors of these horses were considerably smaller, being about the size and build of a pony, but they were very much like a horse in structure, save that the teeth were shorter. As they lived during Pliocene times, they have been named "Pliohippus."

Going back into the past a step farther, though a pretty long step if we reckon by years, we come upon a number of animals very much like horses, save for certain cranial peculiarities and the fact that they had three toes on each foot, while the horse, as every one knows, has but one toe. Now, if we glance at the skeleton of a horse, we will see on either side of the canon-bone, in the same situation as the upper part of the little toes of the Hippotherium, as these three-toed horses are called, a long slender bone, termed by veterinarians the splint bone; and it requires no anatomical training to see that the bones in the two animals are the same. The horse lacks the lower part of his side toes, that is all, just as man will very probably some day lack the last bones of his little toe. We find an approach to this condition in some of the Hippotheres even, known as Protohippus, in which the side toes are quite small, foreshadowing the time when they shall have disappeared entirely. It may also be noted here that the splint bones of the horses of the bronze age are a little longer than those of existing horses, and that they are never united with the large central toe, while nowadays there is something of a tendency for the three bones to fuse into one, although part of this tendency the writer believes to be due to inflammation set up by the strain of the pulling and hauling the animal is now called upon to do. Some of these three-toed Hippotheres are not in the direct line of ancestry of the horse, but are side branches on the family tree, having become so highly specialized in certain directions that no further progress horseward was possible.

Backward still, and the bones we find in the Miocene strata of the West, belonging to those ancestors of the horse to which the name of Mesohippus has been given because they are midway in time and structure between the horse of the past and present, tell us that then all horses were small and that all had three toes on a foot, while the fore feet bore even the suggestion of a fourth toe. From this to our Eocene Hyracothere with four toes is only another long-time step. We may go even beyond this in time and structure, and carry back the line of the horse to animals which only remotely resembled him and had five good toes to a foot; but while these contained the possibility of a horse, they made no show of it.

Increase in size and decrease in number of the toes were not the only changes that were required to transform the progeny of the Hyracothere into a horse. These are the most evident; but the increased complexity in the structure of the teeth was quite as important. The teeth of gnawing animals have often been compared to a chisel which is made of a steel plate with soft iron backing, and the teeth of a horse, or of other grass-eating animals, are simply an elaboration of this idea. The hard enamel, which represents the steel, is set in soft dentine, which represents the iron, and in use the dentine wears away the faster of the two, so that the enamel stands up in ridges, each tooth becoming, as it is correctly termed, "a grinder." In a horse the plates of enamel form curved, complex, irregular patterns; but as we go back in time, the patterns become less and less elaborate, until in the Hyracothere, standing at the foot of the family tree, the teeth are very simple in structure. Moreover, his teeth were of limited growth, while those of the horse grow for a considerable time, thus compensating for the wear to which they are subjected.

We have, then, this direct evidence as to the genealogy of the horse, that between the little Eocene Hyracothere and the modern horse we can place a series of animals by which we can pass by gradual stages from one to the other, and that as we come upward there is an increase in stature, in the complexity of the teeth, and in the size of the brain. At the same time, the number of toes decreases, which tells that the animals were developing more and more speed; for it is a rule that the fewer the toes the faster the animal: the fastest of birds, the ostrich, has but two toes, and one of these is mostly ornamental; and the fastest of mammals, the horse, has but one.

All breeders of fancy stock, particularly of pigeons and poultry, recognize the tendency of animals to revert to the forms whence they were derived and reproduce some character of a distant ancestor; to "throw back," as the breeders term it. If now, instead of reproducing a trait or feature possessed by some ancestor a score, a hundred, or perhaps a thousand years ago, there should reappear a characteristic of some ancestor that flourished 100,000 years back, we should have a seeming abnormality, but really a case of reversion; and the more we become acquainted with the structure of extinct animals and the development of those now living, the better able are we to explain these apparent abnormalities.

Bearing in mind that the two splint bones of the horse correspond to the upper portions of the side toes of the Hippotherium and Mesohippus, it is easy to see that if for any reason these should develop into toes, they would make the foot of a modern horse appear like that of his distant ancestor. While such a thing rarely happens, yet now and then nature apparently does attempt to reproduce a horse's foot after the ancient pattern, for occasionally we meet with a horse having, instead of the single toe with which the average horse is satisfied, one or possibly two extra toes. Sometimes the toe is extra in every sense of the word, being a mere duplication of the central toe; but sometimes it is an actual development of one of the splint bones. No less a personage than Julius Cæsar possessed one of these polydactyl horses, and the reporters of the _Daily Roman_ and the _Tiberian Gazette_ doubtless wrote it up in good journalistic Latin, for we find the horse described as having feet that were almost human, and as being looked upon with great awe. While this is the most celebrated of extra-toed horses, other and more plebeian individuals have been much more widely known through having been exhibited throughout the country under such titles as "Clique, the horse with six feet," "the eight-footed Cuban horse," and so on; and possibly some of these are familiar to readers of this page.

So the collateral evidence, though scanty, bears out the circumstantial proof, derived from fossil bones, that the horse has developed from a many-toed ancestor; and the evidence points toward the little Hyracothere as being that ancestor. It remains only to show some good reason why this development should have taken place, or to indicate the forces by which it was brought about. We have heard much about "the survival of the fittest," a phrase which simply means that those animals best adapted to their surroundings will survive, while those ill adapted will perish. But it should be added that it means also that the animals must be able to adapt themselves to changes in their environment, or to change with it. Living beings cannot stand still indefinitely; they must progress or perish. And this seems to have been the cause for the extinction of the huge quadrupeds that flourished at the time of the three-toed Miocene horse. They were adapted to their environment as it was; but when the western mountains were thrust upward, cutting off the moist winds from the Pacific, making great changes in the rainfall and climate to the eastward of the Rocky Mountains, these big beasts, slow of foot and dull of brain, could not keep pace with the change, and their race vanished from the face of the earth. The day of the little Hyracothere was at the beginning of the great series of changes by which the lake country of the West, with its marshy flats and rank vegetation, became transformed into dry uplands sparsely clad with fine grasses. On these dry plains the more nimble-footed animals would have the advantage in the struggle for existence; and while the four-toed foot would keep its owner from sinking in soft ground, he was handicapped when it became a question of speed, for not only is a fleet animal better able to flee from danger than his slower fellows, but in time of drouth he can cover the greater extent of territory in search of food or water. So, too, as the rank rushes gave place to fine grasses, often browned and withered beneath the summer's sun, the complex tooth had an advantage over that of simpler structure, while the cutting-teeth, so completely developed in the horse family, enabled their possessors to crop the grass as closely as one could do it with scissors. Likewise, up to a certain point, the largest, most powerful animal will not only conquer, or escape from, his enemies, but prevail over rivals of his own kind as well, and thus it came to pass that those early members of the horse family who were preëminent in speed and stature, and harmonized best with their surroundings, outstripped their fellows and transmitted these qualities to their progeny, until, as a result of long ages of natural selection, there was developed the modern horse. The rest man has done: the heavy, slow-paced dray horse, the fleet trotter, the huge Percheron, and the diminutive pony are one and all the recent products of artificial selection.

_REFERENCES_

_The best collection of fossil horses, and one specially arranged to illustrate the line of descent of the modern horse, is to be found in the American Museum of Natural History, New York, but some good specimens, of particular interest because they were described by Professor Marsh and studied by Huxley are in the Yale University Museum. They are referred to in Huxley's "American Addresses; Lectures on Evolution." "The Horse," by Sir W. H. Flower, discusses the horse in a popular manner from various points of view and contains numerous references to books and articles on the subject from which anyone wishing for further information could obtain it._

X

THE MAMMOTH

"_His legs were as thick as the bole of the beech, His tusks as the buttonwood white, While his lithe trunk wound like a sapling around An oak in the whirlwind's might._"

_In the October number of McClure's Magazine for 1899 was published a short story, "The Killing of the Mammoth," by "H. Tukeman," which, to the amazement of the editors, was taken by many readers not as fiction, but as a contribution to natural history. Immediately after the appearance of that number of the magazine, the authorities of the Smithsonian Institution, in which the author had located the remains of the beast of his fancy, were beset with visitors to see the stuffed mammoth, and the daily mail of the Magazine, as well as that of the Smithsonian Institution, was filled with inquiries for more information and for requests to settle wagers as to whether it was a true story or not. The contribution in question was printed purely as fiction, with no idea of misleading the public, and was entitled a story in the table of contents. We doubt if any writer of realistic fiction ever had a more general and convincing proof of success._

About three centuries ago, in 1696, a Russian, one Ludloff by name, described some bones belonging to what the Tartars called "Mamantu"; later on, Blumenbach pressed the common name into scientific use as "Mammut," and Cuvier gallicized this into "Mammouth," whence by an easy transition we get our familiar mammoth. We are so accustomed to use the word to describe anything of remarkable size that it would be only natural to suppose that the name Mammoth was given to the extinct elephant because of its extraordinary bulk. Exactly the reverse of this is true, however, for the word came to have its present meaning because the original possessor of the name was a huge animal. The Siberian peasants called the creature "Mamantu," or "ground-dweller," because they believed it to be a gigantic mole, passing its life beneath the ground and perishing when by any accident it saw the light. The reasoning that led to this belief was very simple and the logic very good; no one had ever seen a live Mamantu, but there were plenty of its bones lying at or near the surface; consequently if the animal did not live above the ground, it must dwell below.

To-day, nearly every one knows that the mammoth was a sort of big, hairy elephant, now extinct, and nearly every one has a general idea that it lived in the North. There is some uncertainty as to whether the mammoth was a mastodon, or the mastodon a mammoth, and there is a great deal of misconception as to the size and abundance of this big beast. It may be said in passing that the mastodon is only a second or third cousin of the mammoth, but that the existing elephant of Asia is a very near relative, certainly as near as a first cousin, possibly a very great grandson. Popularly, the mammoth is supposed to have been a colossus somewhere from twelve to twenty feet in height, beside whom modern elephants would seem insignificant; but as "trout lose much in dressing," so mammoths shrink in measuring, and while there were doubtless Jumbos among them in the way of individuals of exceptional magnitude, the majority were decidedly under Jumbo's size. The only mounted mammoth skeleton in this country, that in the Chicago Academy of Sciences, is one of the largest, the thigh-bone measuring five feet one inch in length, or a foot more than that of Jumbo; and as Jumbo stood eleven feet high, the rule of three applied to this thigh-bone would give the living animal a height of thirteen feet eight inches. The height of this specimen is given as thirteen feet in its bones, with an estimate of fourteen feet in its clothes; but as the skeleton is obviously mounted altogether too high, it is pretty safe to say that thirteen feet is a good, fair allowance for the height of this animal when alive. As for the majority of mammoths, they would not average more than nine or ten feet high. Sir Samuel Baker tells us that he has seen plenty of wild African elephants that would exceed Jumbo by a foot or more, and while this must be accepted with caution, since unfortunately he neglected to put a tape-line on them, yet Mr. Thomas Baines did measure a specimen twelve feet high. This, coupled with Sir Samuel's statement, indicates that there is not so much difference between the mammoth and the elephant as there might be. This applies to the mammoth _par excellence_, the species known scientifically as _Elephas primigenius_, whose remains are found in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere and occur abundantly in Siberia and Alaska. There were other elephants than the mammoth, and some that exceeded him in size, notably _Elephas meridionalis_ of southern Europe, and _Elephas columbi_ of our Southern and Western States, but even the largest cannot positively be asserted to have exceeded a height of thirteen feet. Tusks offer convenient terms of comparison, and those of an average fully grown mammoth are from eight to ten feet in length; those of the famous St. Petersburg specimen and those of the huge specimen in Chicago measuring respectively nine feet three inches, and nine feet eight inches. So far as the writer is aware, the largest tusks actually measured are two from Alaska, one twelve feet ten inches long, weighing 190 pounds, reported by Mr. Jay Beach; and another eleven feet long, weighing 200 pounds, noted by Mr. T. L. Brevig. Compared with these we have the big tusk that used to stand on Fulton Street, New York, just an inch under nine feet long, and weighing 184 pounds, or the largest shown at Chicago in 1893, which was seven feet six inches long, and weighed 176 pounds. The largest, most beautiful tusks, probably, ever seen in this country were a pair brought from Zanzibar and displayed by Messrs. Tiffany & Company in 1900. The measurements and weights of these were as follows: length along outer curve, ten feet and three-fourths of an inch, circumference one foot, eleven inches, weight, 224 pounds; length along outer curve, ten feet, three and one-half inches, circumference two feet and one-fourth of an inch, weight, 239 pounds.

For our knowledge of the external appearance of the mammoth we are indebted to the more or less entire examples which have been found at various times in Siberia, but mainly to the noted specimen found in 1799 near the Lena, embedded in the ice, where it had been reposing, so geologists tell us, anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 years. How the creature gradually thawed out of its icy tomb, and the tusks were taken by the discoverer and sold for ivory; how the dogs fed upon the flesh in summer, while bears and wolves feasted upon it in winter; how the animal was within an ace of being utterly lost to science when, at the last moment, the mutilated remains were rescued by Mr. Adams, is an old story, often told and retold. Suffice it to say that, besides the bones, enough of the beast was preserved to tell us exactly what was the covering of this ancient elephant, and to show that it was a creature adapted to withstand the northern cold and fitted for living on the branches of the birch and hemlock.

The exact birthplace of the mammoth is as uncertain as that of many other great characters; but his earliest known resting-place is in the Cromer Forest Beds of England, a country inhabited by him at a time when the German Ocean was dry land and Great Britain part of a peninsula. Here his remains are found to-day, while from the depths of the North Sea the hardy trawlers have dredged hundreds, aye thousands, of mammoth teeth in company with soles and turbot. If, then, the mammoth originated in western Europe, and not in that great graveyard of fossil elephants, northern India, eastward he went spreading over all Europe north of the Pyrenees and Alps, save only Scandinavia, whose glaciers offered no attractions, scattering his bones abundantly by the wayside to serve as marvels for future ages. Strange indeed have been some of the tales to which these and other elephantine remains have given rise when they came to light in the good old days when knowledge of anatomy was small and credulity was great. The least absurd theory concerning them was that they were the bones of the elephants which Hannibal brought from Africa. Occasionally they were brought forward as irrefutable evidences of the deluge; but usually they figured as the bones of giants, the most famous of them being known as Teutobochus, King of the Cimbri, a lusty warrior said to have had a height of nineteen feet. Somewhat smaller, but still of respectable height, fourteen feet, was "Littell Johne" of Scotland, whereof Hector Boece wrote, concluding, in a moralizing tone, "Be quilk (which) it appears how extravegant and squaire pepill grew in oure regioun afore they were effeminat with lust and intemperance of mouth." More than this, these bones have been venerated in Greece and Rome as the remains of pagan heroes, and later on worshipped as relics of Christian saints. Did not the church of Valencia possess an elephant tooth which did duty as that of St. Christopher, and, so late as 1789, was not a thigh-bone, figuring as the arm-bone of a saint, carried in procession through the streets in order to bring rain?

Out of Europe eastward into Asia the mammoth took his way, and having peopled that vast region, took advantage of a land connection then existing between Asia and North America and walked over into Alaska, in company with the forerunners of the bison and the ancestors of the mountain sheep and Alaskan brown bear. Still eastward and southward he went, until he came to the Atlantic coast, the latitude of southern New York roughly marking the southern boundary of the broad domain over which the mammoth roamed undisturbed.[15] Not that of necessity all this vast area was occupied at one time; but this was the range of the mammoth during Pleistocene time, for over all this region his bones and teeth are found in greater or less abundance and in varying conditions of preservation. In regions like parts of Siberia and Alaska, where the bones are entombed in a wet and cold, often icy, soil, the bones and tusks are almost as perfectly preserved as though they had been deposited but a score of years ago, while remains so situated that they have been subjected to varying conditions of dryness and moisture are always in a fragmentary state. As previously noted, several more or less entire carcasses of the mammoth have been discovered in Siberia, only to be lost; and, while no entire animal has so far been found in Alaska, some day one may yet come to light. That there is some possibility of this is shown by the discovery, recorded by Mr. Dall, of the partial skeleton of a mammoth in the bank of the Yukon with some of the fat still present, and although this had been partially converted into adipocere, it was fresh enough to be used by the natives for greasing, not their boots, but their boats. And up to the present time this is the nearest approach to finding a live mammoth in Alaska.

[15] _This must be taken as a very general statement, as the distinction between and habitats of Elephas primigenius and Elephas columbi, the southern mammoth, are not satisfactorily determined; moreover, the two species overlap through a wide area of the West and Northwest._