A Descendant of the Mammoth.

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 14 August 1914, Page 2

A Descendant of the Mammoth.

(By OARRETT P. SERVISS.) Suppose that some traveller in a remote land should come upon a living animal bearing unmistakable j^, indications of being a lineal descendant of the famous "diplodocus." There would be a great stir in the scientific world over such an apparition from the abyss of time, and a corresponding arousal of popular interest in the wonders and mysteries of natural history. Hardly less interesting is the young Sumatran elephant in the London "Zoo" which has developed the Jong, coarse, red hair of the extinct mammoth. It has a mop hanging over its fore-head that would suilice for college sophomores ;it wears trailing whiskers on its chin, a^ fc L sports mammoth "mutton-shops" front of its ears. Its whole bm\^^ is more or less hairy, and it proclaims in many ways that it belonged to a different species from the ordinary Indian elephant, and approaches nearer than any other existing animal to those Brobriingnagian beasts which, ages ago, roamed over Europe and Asia, occasionally frightening cave men and women, and leaving their huge hairy bodies, and mighty ivor\ tusks, embedded in the -prehistoric swamps of Siberia and Alaska. This elephantine baby, with its earmarks of mammoth descent, offers a startling proof of the persistence of heredity through hundreds of thousands of years. It is only an exaggerated example of w*hat occurs everywhere in the life history of the globe. One of the strangest facts of natural history is that every animal in the earliest stages of its life, while its body is still in embryo, bears the most astonishing resemblance to the earlier types from which the principle of evolution has developed it. This is true of man, who, before he h»j» taken ths form of a human infant, can hardly be distinguished from an '.embryonic ape or monkey. Man's remote ancestors vero evidently as hniry as the mammoth itself, but nature has pretty effectually barbered him, except as to his head.