nomad tribesman's eye at least once in a decade. The nomad tribesmen of Arctic Siberia have a constricted world of sights and sounds and encounters. They do not forget an unusual sight or sound, and there are so few unusual sights and sounds that one generation repeats to another all the unusual sights and sounds that grandmother and great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother saw and heard. If a mammoth had been seen or heard, if traces of it, such as its unhidable great footprints, had been encountered, 500 years ago, every North Siberian baby would be hearing all about it as soon as he could walk. But there are no such stories.

Dr. Lucas genially continues:

We may feel assured that if early man did not conquer the clumsy creature with fire and flint, he yet gazed upon him from the safe vantage point of some lofty tree or inaccessible rock, and then went home to tell his wife and neighbours how the animal escaped because his bow missed fire.

Had this implication that prehistoric man killed mammoths with flint weapons and bows and arrows been peculiar to Dr. Lucas, I should have taken it, at its face value, as a joke. But a number of other writers on the mammoth have also pictured this futile sort of hunting. The great hairy mammoth, in his armour of an inch of tough leather and a foot or two of tough flesh and sinew above his vital organs, to say nothing of the massive imperviousness of his skull, was not killed in numbers (remember the remains of 800 mammoths found among the débris of the Quaternary city at Predmost) by footling methods of that sort.

Prehistoric man must have used his head instead of his hands, and done his mammoth hunting by preparing booby-traps, as weakly armed blacks do their elephant hunting in Africa and SouthEast Asia to-day. Clefts in the ground were tinkered up with boulders and trunks of young trees and laboriously dumped baskets or hide packs of clay, until they became very ugly pitfalls. Then the men went to work and covered the top with saplings, interlaced with boughs, and carpeted this treacherous floor with tufts of turf and weeds, scatterings of sand and chance-dropped stones, until it harmonised completely with its surroundings. A pause of a month for the winds and rains to abolish human scent. Then scouts brought in tidings of a herd of mammoths, perhaps near by, perhaps thirty miles away. The call went out by smoke signals or runners, and the men came in, summoned from settlements for leagues around. Steadily and skilfully the cordon was drawn. A cautious, slowly contracting noose of trackers drew in about the neck of the herd.

'Drat it! We're always seeing or scenting men of late!' the mammoths grumbled as once again they flapped their great ears and went lumbering off down the invisible corridor that stretched toward the trap. At the last a panic was arranged.

Suddenly and simultaneously arose a din of yelling, a loop of dancing, leaping, posturing, wildly excited men. Fires were lit. Spluttering torches were waved-showers of sparks-clouds of smoke.

Off pounded the herd, along the path of least resistance, straight for the clear horizon-and the trap, the yelling mob closing in from the rear. Cries of They are on it! They're on it! They'll clear it! No, they won't! Yes, they will! No, they w- There, what did I tell you? See that big bull? There goes another!' For a moment a great, swaying mass totters desperately on the edge of the pit. It is too late to check its pace. It totters, cants over, forward and to the left, and goes down like a sinking ship.

'Two of 'em-by the great Lord Harry! Boys, we shall eat to-night!' And the mob swarms round, prodding at the trapped brutes' eyes with villainous long, slim, razor-edged flints lashed on 10-foot poles. One monster is killed by direct laceration of the brain. The other is merely blinded, and then a group of daring hunters leap down and stab upward at the heart and abdomen where the belly hide is thinner, while others ram spears down its throat. A cruel and bloody business, but soon over..

When man once began to get after the mammoth with boobytraps in real earnest, I don't think there could be any doubt that mammoths grew increasingly scarcer. An elephant does not begin to bear young until it is thirty. It then produces a young one about every ten years until it is ninety. The mammoth's increase, we may suppose, was equally slow.

An interesting paper by M. H. Neuville on the extinction of the mammoth was published, in 1918, in Anthropologie.

Without being emphatic in dismissing the instrumentality of man in the wiping out of the mammoth, Neuville makes the point that the exertions of the African natives have not wiped out the African elephant. To which I reply that the blacks are seldom hard pressed for food. They live in a tropical land teeming with animal and vegetable food which is easily procurable all the year round. Hunger does not drive, as it does in the grim north. Pleistocene man did not relentlessly kill off the mammoth out of what Artemus Ward called 'sheer cussedness.' sheer cussedness.' He made its pursuit a career because his belly was empty. (The German who invented the piano, not the vindictive Congo nigger, was the fellow who signed the elephant's death warrant. Previous to the arrival of the white trader, avid for piano keys in the raw, the few tusks that went abroad and were used for the blacks' own decoration were not enough to affect the numbers of the elephant.) The early prehistoric elephants originated in Central Asia. Then the world's climate got cooler, and man, exasperated by hunger,

exclaimed: 'I really must have more to eat. I'll go out and chivvy elephants!' He chivvied them this way, and he chivvied them that. The prehistoric elephants that had the bad luck to be chivvied into northern regions found themselves regarded as a staple article of diet rather than a mere interesting item of local fauna, to be pointed out to children and visitors. In consequence they were eventually killed out. But the prehistoric elephants that had the luck to be chivvied into southern tropical regions were able to hold their own and live on, to merge slowly into the present forms. Blacks in huts surrounded by mealie gardens, fowls and great herds of antelope, left the great tusked, trampling brutes alone.

Infinitely more admissible [writes Neuville] is the hypothesis of a diminution of food. A dearth, progressively aggravated, may have contributed to a degeneration of the species, to a diminution of the numbers of its representatives, and may finally have caused them to disappear; but it is impossible to admit, unless by returning to the supposition of sudden cataclysms, that the mammoths let themselves perish of hunger on the frozen soil which preserves the remains.

Passing over the obvious fact that they could not possibly have been preserved had they just sat down and let themselves perish with hunger on North Siberian tundra where I have sweated under a fierce summer sun and a temperature of more than 80° F. in the shade, I would ask the 'starvation school' of paleontologists:

Why assume that the mammoth was such a fool as to stay and starve if the more or less sudden intensification of cold, which you believe in, greatly diminished Pleistocene vegetation and made it increasingly difficult to find enough food? When an African feeding-ground gives out through fire or drought which destroys shrubs, trees and herbage over a large tract of country, do the herds of elephants sit down with the docile resignation of a group of Hindu villagers in a famine, and die? They do not. They gird up their psychical loins and lumber off at a good, steady trot until they come to a district where there is food. So, surely, would the mammoths have done in such a predicament. As food became scarcer in a north that speedily grew colder and colder, a steady southward movement would have ensued, and, instead of dying out, the species would merely have transferred itself to another part of Asia. There is absolutely no evidence, such as would have been furnished by the discovery of quantities of bones and tusks in South Siberia, Manchuria, Mongolia or elsewhere, that any such mass trek occurred.

Neuville, after subjecting the Stenbock-Fermor mammoth's hide and wool to prolonged microscopical examination, declares that the mammoth could not possibly have withstood the North Siberian cold, which, he claims, exterminated it. That theory,

cuticle glands or no cuticle glands, is untenable unless you adduce grounds for the species not moving out of North Siberia when North Siberia became no longer congenial to it. Neuville appears to recognise this, for he makes the suggestion that the mammoth probably had not the faculty of adaptation' of the modern elephants. Or, put bluntly, the mammoth was too big a fool to walk after its southward receding food.

Not having been able, from motives which escape me, to abandon the regions which had become for him particularly inhospitable, the mammoth [he adds] perhaps suffered from the effects of a diet which became more and more difficult, on account of the gradual impoverishment of the vegetation.

The italics are mine.

The only motive, surely, which would, in such circumstances, have trapped the doomed mammoth in the desolate wilderness of the top of Siberia, was the same motive which, within the past few decades, has trapped the doomed bison in the desolate wilderness of the top of Canada-fear of man.

Dr. L. Laloy hit the nail on the head when, in Anthropologie, 1906, vol. 17, p. 234, he declared:

As the climate and the flora of Siberia have not changed since the disappearance of the mammoth, the extinction of this species is not due to cold, against which, besides, it was sufficiently armed, but rather to man, who pursued it first in Europe, then in Russia, and finally left it only the most inhospitable parts of Asia.

BASSETT DIGBY.

SOME LESSER-KNOWN BIRDS OF LONDON

For those whose hobby it is to collect curiosities in bird lore even London can occasionally furnish interesting material. A few months ago, in the twilight of early morning, a pheasant surprised the officials of the Brompton and Piccadilly Railway by strolling with an air of perfect self-possession into the booking office at Russell Square Station. Whither it went-if indeed it went forth again-or whence it came I have never been able to discover. A few days after this startling apparition some watcher of the skies observed a golden eagle soaring and circling over the Zoological Gardens. This bird was seen by several other observers. Unfortunately, I was not one of them, but my disappointment was somewhat assuaged when, next morning, I espied within the precincts of my own small London garden, perched in a grimy yew-tree, a fine, though rather bedraggled, specimen of grey cockatoo. I captured it, or perhaps I should say assisted in its capture, and so gained credence (for ornithologists are as suspect in these matters as fishermen) for what might otherwise have been considered by my friends as a bald and unconvincing narrative.

It is not, however, with the waifs and strays of London bird life that I am here concerned, nor with the exotic or semidomesticated water-fowl of St. James's and other London parks. My present theme has to do only with some of those lesser-known wild birds which, unseen or unnoticed by the great majority of folk, still haunt the gardens and parks within the four-mile radius and can therefore fairly be termed true denizens of London.

It seems a strange statement to make, but it is nevertheless a fact, that, bird-lover though I have always been, it is only since I have lived in London that I have become quite intimately familiar with certain birds with which formerly, when I sought them in the depths of the country, I had only a distant acquaint

ance.

Take, for example, an instance in which my own experience must surely be shared by many other Londoners-the woodpigeon. Three years ago from the window of my chambers in the Temple I watched a pair of wood-pigeons build their nest in the VOL. XCIV-No. 558

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