to the dimensions characteristic of elephants, with the loss of the lower incisors (or with temporary retention of rudimentary ones), while at the same time a true elephant-like trunk must have been developed by the shortening of the lower lip and the prolongation of the combined upper lip and nose.
Mastodons are found in almost all parts of the world. In Asia they gave rise to the elephants, while they themselves originated in Africa from ungulates of more normal type. (See Proboscidea.)
Fig. 1.—Mastodon turicensis (Pliocene).
A, B, Skull and Lower Jaw of Mastodon americanus. C, Lower Jaw of Tetrabelodon longirostris.
The upper tusks of the early mastodons differ from those of elephants in retaining longitudinal bands of enamel. The molar teeth are six in number on each side, increasing in size from before backwards, and, as in the elephants, with a horizontal succession, the anterior teeth being lost before the full development of the posterior ones, which gradually move forward, taking the place of those that are destroyed by wear. This process is, however, less fully developed than in elephants, and as many as three teeth may be in place in each jaw at one time. There is, moreover, in many species a vertical succession, affecting either the third, or the third and second, or (in one American species, Tetrabelodon productus) the first, second and third of the six molar teeth. These three are therefore reckoned as milk-molars, and their successors as premolars, while the last three correspond to the true molars of other mammals. The mode of succession of the teeth in the mastodons exhibits so many stages of the process by which the dentition of elephants has been derived from that of more ordinary mammals. It also shows that the anterior molars of elephants do not correspond to the premolars of other ungulates, but to the milk-molars, the early loss of which in consequence of the peculiar process of horizontal forward-moving succession does not require their replacement by premolars. Specialized species like Mastodon americanus have completely lost the rudimentary premolars.
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| Fig. 2.—Upper Molar of Mastodon arvernensis, viewed from below. |
Mastodons have fewer ridges on their molar teeth than elephants; the ridges are also less elevated, wider apart, with a thicker enamel covering, and scarcely any cement filling the space between them. Sometimes (as in M. americanus) the ridges are simple transverse wedge-shaped elevations, with straight or concave edges. In other species the summits of the ridges are divided into conical cusps, and may have accessory cusps clustering around them (as in M. arvernensis, fig. 2). When the summits of these are worn by mastication their surfaces present circles of dentine surrounded by a border of enamel, and as attrition proceeds different patterns are produced by the union of the bases of the cusps, a trefoil form being characteristic of some species.
Certain of the molar teeth of the middle of the series in both elephants and mastodons have the same number of principal ridges; those in front having fewer, and those behind a greater number. These teeth are distinguished as “intermediate” molars. In elephants there are only two, the last milk-molar and the first true molar (or the third and fourth of the whole series), which are alike in the number of ridges; whereas in mastodons there are three such teeth, the last milk-molar and the first and second molars (or the third, fourth and fifth of the whole series). In elephants the number of ridges on the intermediate molars always exceeds five, but in mastodons it is nearly always three or four, and the tooth in front has usually one fewer and that behind one more, so that the ridge-formula (i.e. a formula expressing the number of ridges on each of the six molar teeth) of most mastodons can be reduced either to 1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, or 2, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5. Three-ridged and four-ridged types occur both in Mastodon and Tetrabelodon. (R. L.*)
MASʽŪDĪ (Abū–l Ḥasan ‘Alī ibn Ḥusain ibn ʽAlī ul-Masʽūdī) (d. c. 956), Arabian historian, was born at Bagdad towards the close of the 9th century. Much of his life was spent in travel. After he had been in Persia and Kerman, he visited Istakhr in 915, and went in the following year to Mūltān and Manṣūra, thence to Cambay, Saimur and Ceylon, to Madagascar and back to Oman. He seems about this time to have been as far as China. After a visit to the shores of the Caspian Sea he visited Tiberias in Palestine, examined the Christian church there, and described its relics. In 943 he was in Antioch, studying the ruins, and two years later in Damascus. The last ten years of his life he spent in Syria and Egypt. His great object in life had been to study with his own eyes the peculiarities of every land and to collect whatever was of interest for archaeology, history and manners. Himself a Mo‘tazilite (see Mahommedan Religion: Sects), he was singularly free from bigotry, and took his information, when necessary, from Persians, Jews, Indians, and even the chronicle of a Christian bishop.
His most extensive work was the Kitāb akhbār uz-Zamān or Annals, in 30 volumes with a supplement, the Kitāb ul-Ausaṭ, a chronological sketch of general history. Of these the first part only of the former is extant in MS. in Vienna, while the latter seems to be in the Bodleian Library, also in MS. The substance of the two was united by him in the work by which he is now best known, the Murūj udh-Dhahab wa Ma‘ādin ul-Jawāhir (“Meadows of Gold and Mines of Precious Stones”), an historical work which he completed in 947. In 956 he finished a second edition of this and made it double its former size, but no copy of this seems to be extant. The original edition has been published at Bulāq and Cairo, and with French translation by C. Barbier de Meynard and Pavet de Courteille (9 vols., Paris, 1861–1877). Another work of Masʽūdī, written in the last year of his life, is the Kitāb ut-Tanbīh wal Ishrāf (the “Book of Indication and Revision”), in which he summarizes the work of his life and corrects and completes his former writings. It has been edited by M. J. de Goeje (Leiden, 1894), and a French translation has been made by Carra de Vaux (Paris, 1896); cf. also the memoir of S. de Sacy published in Meynard’s edition of the Murūj.
An account of Masʽūdī’s works is to be found in de Sacy’s memoir and in Goeje’s preface to his edition of the Tanbīh, and of the works extant in C. Brockelmann’s Gesch. der Arabischen Litteratur, i. 144–145 (Weimar, 1898). C. Field’s Tales of the Caliphs (1909) is based on Masʽūdī. (G. W. T.)
