Its American congener, the mastodon, found its way from Asia
to this continent during the Drift period, when, it is believed,
land communication existed in what is now Bering's Strait, and
perished in a like manner. It was not a sudden but a gradual
extinction in their native habitats, due to natural causes, such
as encroaching ice and other material changes in the animals'
environment. This, I believe, is the accepted scientific opinion of
to-day. But the fact that these animals are at times exposed entire
by the falling away of ice-cliffs or ledges, their flesh being quite
fresh and fit food for dogs, and even men, opens up a very
interesting field of inquiry and conjecture. In the bowels of a
mammoth recently revealed in North-Eastern Siberia vegetable food
was found, probably tropical, at all events unknown to the botany of
to-day. The foregoing facts seem to be at variance with the doctrine
of Uniformity, or with anything like a slow process. The entombment
of these animals must have been very sudden, and due, one would
naturally think, to a tremendous cataclysm followed by immediate
freezing, else their flesh would have become tainted. A recent
English writer predicts another deluge owing to the constant
accumulation of ice at the Antarctic Pole, which for untold ages has
been attracting and freezing the waters of the Northern Hemisphere.
A lowering process, he says, has thus been going on in the ocean
levels to the north through immeasurable time, its record being the
ancient water-marks now high up on the mountain sides of British
Columbia and elsewhere.
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