Page:Collier's New Encyclopedia v. 06.djvu/124

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MAMARONECK
96
MAMMOTH CAVE

MAMARONECK, town in Westchester co., N. Y., on Long Island Sound, 20 miles from New York City. Takes in Larchmont, and many New York business men have homes there. Has clothing and rubber goods factories, but chiefly noted as resort for bathing and yachting. Pop. (1910, including Larchmont) 7,657; (1920) 6,571.

MAMMALIA (-mā′lyä), in zoölogy, mammals, the highest class of the vertebrate sub-kingdom. The individuals are characterized by the possession of mammæ (teats), enabling them to suckle their young. The class is sometimes popularly but erroneously called quadrupeds (four-footed animals). They have red, warm blood, in this respect agreeing with birds, but differing from reptiles, amphibians and fishes. The mouth is concealed by lips and armed with bony and enameled teeth; each ramus of the mandible is composed of a simple piece of bone. The covering is of hair. Normally, there are four limbs, which in some aquatic members of the class are modified into fins. The toes are generally five. Most of the bones are solid or have cavities filled with marrow, the air cells which aid in imparting lightness to the bones of birds being, as a rule, absent. The bones of the cranium and of the face are immovably fixed to each other. The cranium is larger than in other vertebrates, the lower jaw consists of only two pieces. The vertebral column may be divided into five regions, the cervical, the dorsal, the lumbar, the sacral, and the caudal vertebræ. The heart has two auricles and two ventricles. The respiration is by lungs.

MAMMARY GLAND. See Breast, Female.

MAMMOTH, a gigantic prehistoric mammal. The first mammoth discovered was found imbedded in ice in 1799 on the shores of the Lena, by a Tungoosian fisherman named Schumachoff.

W. Boyd Dawkins, treating of the range of the mammoth in time and space, comes to the conclusion that it existed in Great Britain before, during, and after the Glacial period. Its remains are found in France in “enormous abundance”; there it was contemporary with the Cavemen of the Pleistocene, as is proved by a spirited engraving of it on a piece of mammoth ivory found in the Cave of La Madeleine, Dordogne; it has been found in nearly every county in England; and, broadly speaking, its range extended “over the whole land of the Northern Hemisphere.”

MAMMOTH

MAMMOTH CAVE, a cavern near Green river, Edmonson co., Ky., about 85 miles S. S. W. of Louisville. The cave is about 10 miles long, but it requires upward of 150 miles of traveling to explore its multitudinous avenues, chambers, grottoes, rivers, and cataracts. The main cave is 4 miles long, from 40 to 300 feet wide, and rises in height to 125 feet. The most interesting features of the cave are: The Chief City or Temple, covering an area of about four acres, and having a dome of solid rock 120 feet high; the Star Chamber, about 500 feet long by 70 feet wide, with a ceiling 70 feet high, consisting of black gypsum dotted with many white points which, when the chamber is lighted, have all the appearance