or Mammuth, the name of a huge Mammoth animal now unknown, to which are said to have belonged those tusks, bones, and skeletons of vast magnitude, which have been frequently found in different parts of Siberia, as well in the mountains as the valleys; likewise in Ruffia, Germany, and North America. Many specimens of them may be seen in the Imperial cabinet at Petersburgh; in the British, Dr Hunter's, and the late Sir Ashton Lever's museums, and in that of the Royal Society. A description of the mammoth is given by Muller in the Recueil des Voyages au Nord. "This animal, he says, is four or five yards high, and about 30 feet long. His colour is greyish. His head is very long, and his front very broad. On each side, precisely under the eyes, there are two horns, which he can move and cross at pleasure. In walking he has the power of extending and contracting his body to a great degree." Ifrandes Ides gives a similar account; but he is candid enough to acknowledge, that he never knew any person who had seen the mammoth alive. Mr Pennant, however, thinks it "more than probable, that it still exists in some of those remote parts of the vast new continent, unpenetrated yet by Europeans. Providence (he adds) maintains and continues every created species; and we have as much assurance, that no race of animals will any more cease while the earth remaineth, than seed-time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night." The Ohio Indians have a tradition handed down from their fathers respecting these animals, "That in ancient times a herd of them came to the Big-bone Licks, and began an universal destruction of the bears, deer, elks, buffaloes, and other animals which had been created for the use of the Indians; that the Great Man above, looking down and seeing this, was so enraged that he seized his lightning, descended to the earth, seated himself upon a neighbouring mountain on a rock, on which his seat and the print of his feet are still to be seen, and hurled his bolts among them till the whole were slaughtered, except the big bull, who presenting his forehead to the shafts, shook them off as they fell; but at length missing one, it wounded him in the side; whereon, springing round, he bounded over the Ohio, the Wabash, the Illinois, and finally over the great lakes, where he is living at this day."

Several eminent naturalists, as Sir Hans Sloane, Gmelin, Daubenton, and Buffon, are of opinion that these prodigious bones and tusks are really the bones and tusks of elephants, and many modern philosophers have held the mammoth to be as fabulous as the centaur. The great difference in size they endeavour to account for as arising from difference in age, sex, and climate; and the cause of their being found in those northern parts of the world where elephants are no longer natives, nor can even long exist, they presume to have arisen from hence; that, in the great revolutions which have happened in the earth, the elephants, to avoid destruction, have left their native country, and dispersed themselves wherever they could find safety. Their lot has been different. Some in a longer and others in a shorter time after their death, have been transported to great distances by some vast inundations. Those, on the contrary, which survived, and wandered far to the north, must necessarily have fallen. Mammoth, fallen victims to the rigour of the climate. Others, without reaching to so great a distance, might be drowned, or perish with fatigue. In the year 1767, Dr Hunter, with the assistance of his brother Mr J. Hunter, had an opportunity of investigating more particularly this part of natural history, and has evidently proved, that these fossil bones and tusks are not only larger than the generality of elephants, but that the tusks are more twisted, or have more of the spiral curve, than elephants teeth; and that the thigh and jaw bones differ in several respects from those of the elephant: but what put the matter beyond all dispute was the shape of the grinders, which clearly appeared to belong to a carnivorous animal, or at least to an animal of the mixed kind; and to be totally different from those of the elephant, which is well known not to be of the carnivorous, but omnivorous kind, both by the form of its grinders and by its never fasting animal food.—Some have supposed these fossil bones to belong to the hippopotamus or river-horse; but there are many reasons against this supposition, as the hippopotamus is even much smaller than the elephant, and has such remarkably short legs, that his belly reaches within three or four inches of the ground.

North America seems to be the quarter where the remains in question most abound. On the Ohio, and in many parts farther north, tusks, grinders, and skeletons of unparalleled magnitude, which can admit of no comparison with any animal at present known, are found in vast numbers, some lying on the surface of the earth, and some a little below it. A Mr Stanley, taken prisoner by the Indians near the mouth of the Tanisssee, relates, as Mr Jefferson informs us, that after being transferred through several tribes, from one to another, he was at length carried over the mountains west of the Missouri to a river which runs westwardly; that these bones abounded there; and that the natives described to him the animal to which they belonged as still existing in the northern parts of their country; from which description he judged it to be an elephant. Bones of the same kind have been lately found some feet below the surface of the earth, in salines opened on the North Holston, a branch of the Tanisssee, about the latitude of 36° N. Instances are mentioned of like animal remains found in the more southern climates of both hemispheres; but Mr Jefferson observes, "they are either so loosely mentioned, as to leave a doubt of the fact; so inaccurately described, as not to authorize the clasping them with the great northern bones; or so rare, as to found a suspicion that they have been carried thither as curiosities from more northern regions. So that, on the whole, there seem to be no certain vestiges of the existence of this animal farther south than the salines last mentioned. It is remarkable (continues he) that the tusks and skeletons have been ascribed by the naturalists of Europe to the elephant, while the grinders have been given to the hippopotamus or river-horse. Yet it is acknowledged, that the tusks and skeletons are much larger than those of the elephant, and the grinders many times greater than those of the hippopotamus, and essentially different in form. Wherever these grinders are found, there also we find the tusks and skeleton; but no skeleton of the hippopotamus nor grinders of the elephant. It will not be said that the hippopotamus and elephant came always to the same spot, the former to deposit his grinders, and the latter his tusks and skeleton. For what became of the parts not deposited there? We must agree, then, that these remains belong to each other; that they are of one and the same animal; that this was not a hippopotamus, because the hippopotamus had no tusks nor such a frame, and because the grinders differ in their size as well as in the number and form of their points. That it was not an elephant, I think ascertained by proofs equally decisive. I will not avail myself of the authority of the celebrated anatomist*, who, from an examination of the form and structure of the tusks, has declared they were essentially different from those of the elephant; because another anatomist†, equally celebrated, has declared, on a like examination, that they are precisely the same. Between two such authorities I will suppose this circumstance equivocal. But, 1. The skeleton of the mammoth (for so the incognitum has been called) bespeaks an animal of five or six times the cubic volume of the elephant, as M. de Buffon has admitted. 2. The grinders are five times as large, are square, and the grinding surface studded with four or five rows of blunt points: whereas those of the elephant are broad and thin, and their grinding surface flat. 3. I have never heard an instance, and suppose there has been none, of the grinder of an elephant being found in America. 4. From the known temperature and constitution of the elephant, he could never have existed in those regions where the remains of the mammoth have been found. The elephant is a native only of the torrid zone and its vicinities: if, with the assistance of warm apartments and warm clothing, he has been preserved in life in the temperate climates of Europe, it has only been for a small portion of what would have been his natural period, and no instance of his multiplication in them has ever been known. But no bones of the mammoth, as I have before observed, have been ever found further south than the salines of the Holston, and they have been found as far north as the Arctic circle. Those, therefore, who are of opinion that the elephant and mammoth are the same, must believe, 1. That the elephant known to us can exist and multiply in the frozen zone; or, 2. That an internal fire may once have warmed those regions, and since abandoned them, of which, however, the globe exhibits no unequivocal indications; or, 3. That the obliquity of the ecliptic, when these elephants lived, was so great as to include within the tropics all those regions in which the bones are found; the tropics being, as is before observed, the natural limits of habitation for the elephant. But if it be admitted that this obliquity has really decreased, and we adopt the highest rate of decrease yet pretended, that is, of one minute in a century, to transfer the northern tropic to the Arctic circle, would carry the existence of these supposed elephants 250,000 years back; a period far beyond our conception of the duration of animal bones left exposed to the open air, as these are in many instances. Besides, though these regions would then be supposed within the tropics, yet their winters would have been too severe for the sensibility of the elephant. They would have had, too, but one day and one night. Mammoth, in the year; a circumstance to which we have no reason to suppose the nature of the elephant fitted. However, it has been demonstrated, that if a variation of obliquity in the ecliptic takes place at all, it is vibratory, and never exceeds the limits of nine degrees, which is not sufficient to bring these bones within the tropics. One of these hypotheses, or some other equally arbitrary and inadmissible to cautious philosophy, must be adopted to support the opinion that these are the bones of the elephant. For my own part, I find it easier to believe that an animal may have existed, resembling the elephant in his tusks and general anatomy, while his nature was in other respects extremely different. From the 30th degree of south latitude to the 30th of north, are nearly the limits which nature has fixed for the existence and multiplication of the elephant known to us. Proceeding thence northwardly to 36½ degrees, we enter those affixed to the mammoth. The further we advance north, the more their vestiges multiply as far as the earth has been explored in that direction; and it is as probable as otherwise, that this progression continues to the pole itself, if land extends so far. The centre of the frozen zone then may be the acme of their vigour, as that of the torrid is of the elephant. Thus nature seems to have drawn a belt of separation between these two tremendous animals, whose breadth indeed is not precisely known, though at present we may suppose it about 6½ degrees of latitude; to have assigned to the elephant the regions south of these confines, and those north to the mammoth, founding the constitution of the one in her extreme of heat, and that of the other in the extreme of cold. When the Creator has therefore separated their nature as far as the extent of the scale of animal life allowed to this planet would permit, it seems perverse to declare it the same, from a partial resemblance of their tusks and bones. But to whatever animal we ascribe these remains, it is certain such a one has existed in America, and that it was the largest of all terrestrial beings of which any traces have ever appeared.