12th Tune.
Tungradual cooling of the Asiatic climate may be supported by the existence of the bones of the mammoth in northern Siberia. This hairy elephant lived in that country when the air was temperate and when abundant forests supplied it with the young twigs on which it lived. Since that time northern Siberia has become an intolerably cold desert. The ground there is constantly frozen to a depth of more than two feet below the surface and produces only moss with a few modest looking flowers. The mammoth very early drew the attention of the Chinese. It is first mentioned in the Er-yeand extin Chuang-tse in the third century before Christ. The enormous quantities of valuable ivory which the remains of the mammoth in Siberia furnish made known to the ancient Chinese the existence of the animal through their trade with Tartary. On account of its being found in very many localities imbedded in the soil and in rocks, old books always speak of it as a monstrous mole living underground. It was found, they tell us, in China and in Tartary. Chuang-tse wrote as a poet and pictures it (yer shu) as drinking a river of water before its thirst was satisfied. He had been told of the fossil bones or seen them and filled up the picture by the aid of imagination either his own or that of those from whom he heard the story. Seven centuries afterwards a medical writer, Tao Hung-king, says "it is found in forests, and is as one asa water buffalo. It is in form something like a pig. Its colour is a grayish red, its feet are like those of the elephant. Its breast and upper tail are white, and blunt though powerful. Its flesh is eaten and is like that of the cow. It is known by the name "King of the Shu tribe. In calamitous years this animal often al years the seventh century this account of the animal was discredited. Its great size was not believed. Its hiding and walking in the earth were thought absurd. These disparaging criticisms were made by Chen ''sang-chi, an eminent writer, who does not seem to have been shown any of the bones of the animal. Yet in the 11th century Ssu Sung. defended the statements of early writers on this subject. Bones of some large unknown animal had been found at 'T'sangchou near Tientsin, just as the Zsin History states that at Siuencheng, a little way south-west of Nanking, there had been found similar remains in the third century. It was also related that the same animal existed in Tartary where the larger specimens weighed 1,000 catties and was fond of living in water. It was like an elephant in the legs though it bad the hoofs of a donkey. Another place where it was found was at Tsiuning called it the "recumbent cow." Tensed near Pingyang Fu in Shansi. The people
to wander among the mountains at times and drop its hair in the fields. Each one became a rat and it was the damage to the crops. The Liang history says that in Japan there is a large animal like a cow of the Shu class which is eaten by a great serpent. These are all instances of the mammoth ("hidden, sku") and prove the correct ness of Tao's words. Tao has, been blamed without reason by men who had not themselves inquired into the truth of his statements. The name by which this animal is known in Shensi is "the small donkey." Such are the testimonies of the existence of the mammoth collected _by the author of the Pent'sao. The Chinese accounts of a monster animal as given in the Peat'sao could not if taken alone be regarded as agreeing with the Siberian mammoth except in a rough way, yet they are very important. Early in this century the remains of that animal were found in so many parts of Siberia and the ivory was of such great commercial value that the whole scientific world was interested. Cuvier in France was absorbed in the contemplation of the remarkable bones submitted to him and decided that. as the mammoth was met with often with the flesh undecayed, there must have been a sudden change of climate from temperate to extremely cold to account for the frozen condition in which the remains were found. Klaproth who was then at Kiachta visited the Chinese drag shops and found that the bones were known to the Chinese there. They gave him the name of the animal as it was recorded in the Pents'ao. It was he that suggested that the throne of ivory of the Mongol Emperors was formed of the tusks and teeth of the Siberian mammoth and that Chinese traders for two thousand years would be ready to buy on any occasion the ivory which was from time to time discovered Berlin and made known to the learned and brought away. He went home to
world that the Chinese had accounts of the animal. The passages he trans-Inted are apparently those which are found in the Pents'ao in the chapter on the class Sku which includes the Rodentia with the squirrel, sable, ermine, and weasel. There can be no doubt that the mammoth and possibly other fossil animals known to the Chinese are assigned to the class Shu, because they were supposed to hide themselves in the soil of cultivated fields and to have died underground in the position where their bones were afterwards found, moths and the Flood," by Henry Howarth, MP., author ofa History of the Mongols, the attempt is made to prove that the change of the Siberian climate from mild to severe was sudden. Lyell's uniformitarian doctrine is opposed. Yet the evidence from China of a gradual change of climate in that country was not known to this author, and if he had had this evidence before him showing as it does that there is a very slow refrigeration taking place, causing gradual changes in the vegetable as.well as the animal world, he might have modified his theory. Perhaps the best form for the hypothesis to assume is that of a rapid local refrigeration in Siberia, jaimed with a slow refrigeration generally over the Asiatic continent. The Chinese facts on climate point distinctly to a slow refrigeration, but do not in any way suggest a sudden catastrophe by which the heat shown by the thermometer was reduced to a large extent, The Chinese mammoth has been found in four principal localities; in the Yellow River alluvium near Tientsin, in the loess formation near the centre of Shansi, in Shensi, also on the banks of the Yangtze River in Anhui. It was this last discovery that drew the attention of Tan Hung-king, who belonged to Nanking, and being a noted Taoist and a writer of the school of Pao Pu-tsz would feel the deepest interest in the discovery so near his home.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.