did not freeze up cave lions, wolves, reindeer, cave bear, caribou, bison, badger, hyena, ibex, chamois, glutton, and so forth. No explanation as to why the country was not littered with other frozen-up woolly rhinos and mammoths.

Now, to my mind, this is what really did happen :

The cold-storage mammoths and woolly rhinos that have survived in flesh and blood for anything from half a million years to perhaps as little as 15,000 or 20,000 years were just a very few which happened to fall into a deep, steep-sided crevasse, filled with snow, on the eve of or during a blizzard, which filled in the hole behind them-when they themselves did not fill it in by their struggles.

Practically all cold-storage mammoths and woolly rhinos are found on the sides of the cliffs sloping down to a river (a lake in one or two cases). Even nowadays I found numbers of deep crevasses in the cliffs and banks of the Siberian rivers, after scores of thousands of years of erosion since the heyday of the mammoth. Down south, where no cold storage mammoths are found, no snow remains in them after the end of May, but up north the mammoth country has countless riparian gullies which are full of snow, all the year round, for years on end. Then an unusually hot summer may thin down or melt out the snow. It may also seal up the residue of snow two-thirds of the way down a gully in this way: Alternate frosts and thaws give a hard surface to the snow in the gully; a week's hot sun melts the snow above in the forest; and down pour cascades of cold water into the gully, where a pool gathers on the ice-glazed surface of the snow; then come some nights of hard frost, and overcast days. This puts in a floor of ice. Rains follow; mud and water washes into the gully from above. More frosts. Winter and more snow. What I mean to point out is that even nowadays a North Siberian gully that is quite empty and dry this year may, by the mere fluctuation of the thermometer, be half filled with snow and mud and sealed up-quite possibly for a million years or more-by next year. It all depends on the particular jumble of weather that lies ahead. So much for the gullies.

Let us return to our mammoth. He was out browsing among the pine scrub one evening about B.C. 300,000, when night, or a blizzard, or both, overtook him. Even the Siberian tiger of to-day, for all his long thick fur, does not sit out on a shelterless hillside in a blizzard, and purr with Spartan nonchalance; he loped off to the shelter of the lee side of a forest.

This young scrub is good tender eating,' ruminated the mammoth, but in a high wind and 50 under zero, with driving snow, it is indubitably draughty. I'm going into cover.' Along he pounded, head down, into the teeth of the blizzard, toward that

thicket of well-grown pines which he had so often previously found Suddenly the great hairy head shook, and

a snug harbour.

the ears flapped angrily.

'Drat the snow! Beastly stuff! How it makes one's eyes sting. It is worse than the sand on the beaches in those summer winds. Phew! There's a double handful of the stuff, flung straight into my eyes. Golly, how they are watering! It's impossible to see in this weather. All a fellow can do is blink, and shove his head down, and slog ahead. What a fool one is to go on living up here! Grandmother always said that there was a tradition in the family that we used to come from a place down south where weather was weather. "Down there!" she used to say, waving her trunk at the flocks of swallows passing southward of a bleak early August afternoon. I remember how tickled I was as a kid at the thought of Grannie--she was a hefty old girl with fourteen-footer tusks, that she could use, too, by Jove! if you put her back up-winging her way south with the swallows and the cuckoos. I don't envy any hill-top on which she would have chosen to roo- -wow ! !

At this point the ground faded away under his feet, and the poor brute found himself floundering about, with a broken or badly sprained leg, at the bottom of a 30-foot snowdrift, in a steep-sided crevasse. Had you peered over the edge a moment after he fell in, you would have seen down there, at the bottom of the shaft his falling body had made, a large black, agitated hairy back. A few seconds later, however, when he had plunged about a little, great masses of snow had caved in from above, and it was all over with him. Fifteen feet of snow covered him. Successive snows and thaws produced layers of ice, and, mingled with it, masses of mud and pine-needles, twigs, branches and stones, washed down, in later summers, by torrential rains, that worked their way down, through fissures in the ice and through the powdery snow, until they permeated the bottom of the gully, leaving the mammoth embedded in a mixture of snow and ice and frozen mud and forest litter. . . .

Most gullies or clefts in a riparian cliff are narrow to shoreward and broaden out toward the river. The woolly rhino, the only other heavy beast who is still, on very rare occasions, found in the flesh, was built on torpedo lines. When he fell in, if he did not break a limb, he probably drove a tunnel through to the open end of the gully. He had stubby little legs and no huge curly tusks to impede him. He was lucky enough to be built like the bows of a ship, while the great, ungainly mammoth was built like the stern.

His other contemporaries were not heavy enough to go through snowdrifts, or managed to tunnel out. I made many inquiries while knocking about in Siberia, but I never heard of a single

modern Siberian wild beast, even the Polar bear or the Manchurian tiger, which is ever found dead at the bottom of a snowdrift when spring comes. Of course, such an accident is not impossible within certain limits. But remember that the deeper a snowdrift is the greater the pressure on the snow, and consequently the harder the snow. Where the reindeer or the sabre-toothed tiger would fall in only 10 feet and be able, by a strenuous burst of energy, to tunnel or clamber out, the great mammoth, weighing several tons, would go down, like a plummet, to the bottom.

We are confronted, however, with the fascinating possibility of one day finding a sabre-toothed tiger or a group of men who died half a million years ago in one of these gullies, most probably on the top of a mammoth. They could quite easily have been preserved in cold storage by precisely the same agencies that preserved the mammoth. Suppose the mammoth that fell, late one night, to have been merely stunned. It was scented by a hungercrazed sabre-toothed tiger, or found by a group of starving and venturesome palæolithic hunters. The tiger might have sprung down. The men might have tied a rope of knotted hides to a neighbouring tree, and clambered down it, to hack off lumps of flesh with their stone axes. The mammoth might have stirred suddenly, or the men's hide rope broken, and a mass of snow as big as a cottage caved in on them. Then they would be in just the same boat as the mammoth. .

The opinions of paleontologists as to how the mammoth became exterminated vary very considerably. No palæontologist of note seems to approach the problem in its broader aspect by considering first how beasts in general become extinct, and then applying the theoretical conclusions arrived at to the particular data available concerning the case of the mammoth. By now, thanks to Darwin and in the teeth of the implacable opposition of that eminent tent orator, Mr. William J. Bryan, I think we are all agreed that, though species may die out abruptly, they are never born abruptly. No species stands still indefinitely, though it may stand still for a long while. Eventually it will disappear either by merging into something different or by extinction. The mammoth may have merged, as even to-day, though few people realise it, the African elephant is merging. (There are more than a dozen well-defined types of elephant in Africa.) The mammoth, like every other creature, came into existence by a merging. Already we have quite a neat series of his ancestral species. The only creature now living into which he might at all conceivably have merged is the Asiatic elephant. (The adult Asiatic elephants in the cool mountain altitudes of Siam, Burma and the Malaysian peninsula are sometimes noticeably hairy, and almost all baby Asiatic elephants are born hairy.)

But the male of the modern Asiatic elephant has very small tusks, and the female has often none at all. When you come to consider the enormous periods of time needed for mergings, and the fact that man was already very much on the scene, and quite an artist too, when the mammoth was roaming about with his gigantic tusks, there really does not appear to have been long enough time for the great change into the form of the modern Asiatic elephant. The fact that no mammoth remains have yet been found between mid-Siberia and the Himalayas, while not being conclusive of there being none to be found, is nevertheless significant. In a word, the evidence is strong that the mammoth disappeared not from merging, but from becoming extinct.

Well, now, how do creatures become extinct? In the insect world there is no League of Nations. Savage and merciless war is the order of the day, no quarter asked and none bestowed. Big fleas have little fleas,' etc.

The pure chance of climatic changes helps now one parasite, now another; now victim, now aggressor. Professor Lefroy's brilliant research has lifted the veil in that field. Man, until yesterday, has not concerned himself with insects. But with beasts and birds and fishes man has concerned himself very extensively. In every case that I can call to mind of beasts or birds or fishes having become extinct or notably scarce during the past century or two, man is the culprit. Man wiped out the dodo and the great auk. Man wiped out the bison in the United States, and man has so thinned out elephants and other big game in the wilds of Africa that in most regions you have to stuff an expensive licence into your pocket before you are permitted to sally forth with your gun. Man has well-nigh exterminated wild birds in Northern France, and man has exterminated trout, beavers, wolves, bears, and salmon in Britain, except for the menageries and patches of water to violate which entails a sojourn in prison. All over the world man is busy exterminating. Down in the Antarctic he is killing out some kinds of whales. In Canada he has put a price on the head of the coyote and the wolf, in India on the head of the tiger and many another beast. In Tasmania the sheep farmer is wiping out that savage little bear, the Tasmanian Devil. In New Guinea the Papuan and the Dutchman are wiping out the birds of paradise. The Norwegian bear is making its last stand. So are the wild boar of the Riviera hills and the camel of South-West Spain.

Man merely asks the bird and the beast: Are you more good to me dead or alive? If the former is the case, thumbs down! Live reindeer were more good to the cave men of Dordogne than dead reindeer. They were tractable. Hence they survived. Dead mammoths were more good to man than live mammoths.

They were intractable and dangerous. They were exterminated. The process took time, but it was achieved eventually.

Dr. Lucas says in his Animals of the Past:

Mr. Boyd Dawkins thinks that the mammoth was actually exterminated by early man, but, even granting that this might be true for Southern and Western Europe, it could not be true of the herds that inhabited the wastes of Siberia or of the thousands that flourished in Alaska and the Western United States. So far as man is concerned, the mammoth might still be living in these localities where, before the discovery of gold drew thousands of miners to Alaska, there were vast stretches of wilderness wholly untrodden by the foot of man. Neither could this theory account for the disappearance of the mastodon from North America, where that animal covered so vast a stretch of territory that man, unaided by Nature, could have made little impression on its numbers.

That seems to me a thin justification for dismissing the possibility of man having abolished mammoths. Dr. Lucas puts in the same category North America, where no proof has yet been forthcoming of man's existence in the time of the mammoth, and Siberia, where such proof has been discovered. Near the bank of the River Ob, in the West Siberian government of Tomsk, Professor N. T. Kashchenko found, in 1896, the remains of a mammoth 12 feet below the surface of a cliff which stands 136 feet above the present surface of the River Tom. Only a few bones of the skeleton were missing, and with it were associated thirty flint knives, besides scrapers and about 100 flakes. The large bones were split in the usual way for the extraction of the marrow, and there were other clear indications of the presence of man. Remember that very little archæological work, or promiscuous excavating, has been done yet in Siberia and Alaska, and not a great deal in American haunts of the mammoth. The fact that previous to the recent gold rush to the Yukon Alaska was very thinly populated gives no indication at all of the population scores of thousands of years ago. One might just as well declare that because the sites of Babylon and Nineveh are empty desert to-day no teeming masses of population could ever have dwelt in them. After all, the world was pretty thinly populated everywhere in paleolithic times, so far as we can ascertain, and thinly populated as are many tracts of modern Africa, the natives have still managed to bring the modern elephant to the brink of extinction.

As to the suggestion that the mammoth might still be living in the vast northern wildernesses, I admit it is a fascinating notion to play with. In Northern Siberia I had my days of day-dreaming, in which I told myself: By Jove! those beasts may still be living up here now, you know.' But I did not manage to convince myself. Wild and vast as are those northern wildernesses, and apparently empty, I very much doubt if there is a single tract of them as small as the county of London, which is not swept by a