ade a business of watching the ice masses at the
river mouth for dark spots that showed where a mammoth was encased in
the ice. If an iceberg broke off near such a place, the sun might thaw
the ice front of the glacier, until the hairy monster could at length be
reached. His long hair served for many uses, and the wool that grew
under the hair was used as a protection from the Arctic winter. The
frozen flesh was eaten; the bones carved into useful tools; but the
chief value of the find was in the great tusks of ivory, that curved
forward and pointed over the huge shoulders. It was worth a fortune to
get a pair and sell them to a buyer from St. Petersburg.

One of the finest museum specimens of the mammoth was secured by buying
the tusks of the dealer, and by his aid tracing the location of the
carcass, which was found still intact, except that dogs had eaten away
part of one foreleg, bone and all. From this carefully preserved
specimen, models have been made, exactly copying the shape and the size
of the animal, its skin, hair, and other details.

The sabre-toothed tiger, the sharp tusks of which, six to eight inches
long, made it a far more ferocious beast than any modern tiger of
tropical jungles, was a Quaternary inhabitant of Europe and America. So
was a smaller tiger, and a lion. The Irish elk, which stood eleven feet
high, with antlers that spread ten feet apart at the tips, was monarch
in the deer family, which had several different species on both
continents. Wild horses and wild cattle, one or two of great size,
roamed the woods, while rhinos and the hippopotamus kept near the
water-courses. Hyenas skulked in the shadows, and acted as scavengers
where the great beasts of prey had feasted. Sloths and cuirassed
animals, like giant armadillos, lived in America. Among bears was one,
the cave bear, larger than the grizzly. True monkeys climbed the trees.
Flamingo, parrots, and tall secretary birds followed the giant
_gastornis_, the ancestor of wading birds and ostriches, which stood ten
feet high, but had wings as small and useless as the auk of later times.

With the entrance of the modern types of trees, came other flowering
plants, and with them the insects that live on the nectar of flowers.
Through a long line of primitive forms, now extinct, flowering plants
and their insect friends conform to modern types. The record is written
in the great stone book.

The Age of Mammals in America and Europe ended with