and its relation to the Indian elephant, it appears to me very probable that they are two well-marked varieties rather than two extinct species, and that the latter has derived those trifling characters by which it is distinguished from the former in the untold ages of its sojourn in the tropical forests of India. The possession of hair and wool so remarkable in the Siberian mammoth depends mainly upon the climate, and cannot therefore be taken to be a specific character. It is very probable that the mammoth in Italy, and in the districts bordering on the Gulf of Mexico, presented as great a contrast in those respects with the mammoth of the north as the Thibetan mastiff and goat, which lose their fine wool when brought down from the Himalaya to Kashmir.[1]
Fig. 23.—Upper Canine of Cave-bear, Wookey Hole, 11.
The mammoth was accompanied in its wanderings from the high northern latitudes of Asia by the woolly
- ↑ Falconer, Nat. Hist. Rev., 1862, p. 113. On the variability in the development of hair and wool, see Darwin, Variation under Domestication, ii. p. 278.
