MAMMOTHS.

Hokitika Guardian, 11 May 1926, Page 4

MAMMOTHS.

( By A. J. Harrop in the “Daily -Mail,” London). Lumping through tlio oak-swamp. vast and dim and gray, I have watched the mammoths pass at dusk of day; Through tho quaking hollow, through the tree-trunks stark. Gleams of mighty ivory breaking up tho dark.

Most people have Ireen fascinated at some time in their lives by stories of mighty mammoths which bestrode the world hundreds of centuries ago, so Mr Bassett Digby’s new book, “The Mammoth and Mammoth-Hunting in North-East Siberia” is assured of a warm welcome. Mr Digby has the happy gift of expressing scientific simply. . Mammoths, lie tells us, did not spend all their time chasing our ancestors and eating them, as some people relieve. Like Nohuch.rtdiie7.arr, they ate gnass—and pretty yellow buttercups. This wo know because seeds and other recognisable parts of buttercups have been found in the crevices of the mammoth’s teeth.

The mammoths of old were like larger, hairier elephants, about twelve or thirteen feet in height at the shoulder. Their remains have been found in a great many places in Siberia, under the North Sea, and even in Fleetstreet.

Tho most fortunate man in the realm of mammoth discovery was the Russian scientist and explorer, Baron Gerhard von Mnydcll, who found .three mammoths which, at the time of his visit or shortly before, were still clothed in their Pleistocene flesh (and hair. Some of the flesh, preserved in cold storage for countless thousands of years, was still good enough for the dogs to eat.

Mammoths figure in the correspondence of Catherine H., of Russia with, Voltaire, who was “most astonished to hear of the skeletons of elephants found in the north of Siberia.” Aristotcl wolibled on the problem of whether the mammoth olepUmts had kneejoints, ami even Slnikesspeare had doubts on the point. “The elephant hath joints.” lie says in “Troilus and Cressida,” “hut none for courtesy. His legs are for necessity, not for flexure.”

Mr Digby devotes one rollicking chapter to “The Great Mammoth Hoax” perpetrated in the United States in 1899. To this day, lie says, thousands of American parents “tell little Hiram and Sadie how proud they ought, to he that it was an American citizen that first made God’s own country sale for democracy .... by

slaying the last, of the mammoths.”