CREATION BY EVOLUTION
moth, the greatest of all the elephants, measuring in height thirteen and a half feet. Just after the Ice Age all these animals died out, just why it is hard to say; perhaps by some contagious disease.
Of the several Pleistocene mammoths in Asia, only one has survived, the Indian elephant. The Pleistocene elephants of Africa are less well known, but two species are still living on that continent, the African elephant, some forms eleven feet high, and a dwarf form from the Congo, which is but four to five feet high. With the changes which took place in Europe after the disappearance of the ice sheet, some land areas became separated from the mainland, and the elephants on these new islands were restricted in their wandering and breeding. On Malta, for instance, there were developed two dwarf forms, related to the elephants of the mainland but consistently small—Elephas melitensis, some five feet high, and the tiniest of all elephants, Elephas falconi, but three feet high. Sicily, Cyprus, and Crete also had dwarf varieties.
The successive types that have been thus briefly described form a regular series, illustrated in Fig. 4. On looking at this figure we find it impossible to resist the conclusion that we have here the stages in the evolution of existing elephants—that these animals have come into existence by a series of gradual changes. Little swamp-dwellers with numerous simple teeth capable of crunching succulent aquatic vegetation become adapted, step by step, to life in a forest. The limbs were converted into stout pillars, to support the increasing bulk of the body and to stamp down small plants, and the toes were fused together into an insensitive mass, practically unpierceable by spines or thorns. The snout was drawn out into a muscular, flexible proboscis, capable, on the one hand, of gathering up ground vegetation and, on the other, of taking toll from the foliage of trees.
[ 238 ]
