The World Before the Deluge
In all ages, and in almost all countries, chance discoveries have
POST-PLIOCENE PERIOD.
383 been made of fossil bones of elephants in the soil. Pliny has transmitted to us a tradition, recorded by the historian Theophrastus,
who ^vrote 320 years before Jesus Christ, of the existence of bones of fossil ivory in the soil of Greece, that the bones were
sometimes transformed into stones. "These bones," the historian gravely tells us, " were both black and white, and born of the earth." Some of the elephant's bones having a slight resemblance to those of man, they have often been mistaken for human bones. In the earlier historic times these great bones, accidentally disinterred, have passed as having belonged to some hero or demigod; at a later period they were thought to be the bones of giants. We have already spoken of the mistake made by the Greeks in taking the patella of a fossil elephant for the knee-bone of Ajax; in the same manner the bones revealed by an earthquake, and attributed by Pliny to a giant, belonged, no doubt, to a fossil elephant. To a similar origin we may assign the pretended body of Orestes, thirteen feet in length, which was dis-
Fig. 181. — Tooth of the Mammoth.
covered at Tegea by the Spartans; those of Asterius, the son of Ajax, discovered in the Isle of Ladea, of ten cubits in length (about eighteen feet), according to Pausanius; finally, such were the great bones found in the Isle of Rhodes, of which Phlegon of Tralles speaks in his *• Mundus Subterraneus." We might fill volumes with the history of the remains of pretended giants found in ancient tombs. The books, in fact, which exist, formed a voluminous literature in the middle ages — entitled Giga7itoIogy. All the facts, more or less real, true or imaginative, may be explained by the accidental discovery of the bones of some of these gigantic animals. We find in works on Gigantology, the history of a pretended giant, discovered in the 4th century, at Trapani in Sicily, of which Boccaccio speaks, and which may be taken for Polyphemus; of another, found in the i6th century, according to Fasellus, near Palermo; others, according to the same author, at Melilli between Leontium and Syracuse, Calatrasi and Petralia,, at
each of which places the bones of supposed giants were disinterred. P. Kircher speaks of three other giants being found in Sicily, of which only the teeth remained perfect.
In 1577, a storm having uprooted an oak near the cloisters of Rej^den, in the Canton of Lucerne, in Switzerland, some large bones were exposed to view. Seven years after, the celebrated physician and Professor at Basle, Felix Platen, being at Lucerne, examined these bones, and declared they could only be those of a giant. The Council of Lucerne consented to send the bones to Basle for more minute examination, and Platen thought himself justified in attributing to the giant a height of nineteen feet. He designed a human skeleton on this scale, and returned the bones with the drawing to Lucerne. In 1706 there only remained of these bones a portion of the scapula and a fragment of the wrist bone; the anatomist Blumenbach, who saw them at the beginning of the century, easily recognised in them the bones of an Elephant. Let us not omit to add, as a complement to this story, that since the sixteenth century, the inhabitants of Lucerne have adopted the image of this fabulous giant as the supporter of the city arms.
Spanish history preserves many stories of giants. The supposed tooth of St. Christopher, shown at Valence, in the church dedicated to the saint, was certainly the molar tooth of a fossil Elephant; and in 1789, the canons of St. Vincent carried through the streets in public procession, to procure rain, the pretended arm of a saint, which was nothing more than the femur of an Elephant. In France, in the reign of Charles VII. (1456), some of these bones of imaginary giants appeared in the bed of the Rhone. A repetition of the phenomenon occurred near Saint-Peirat, opposite Valence, when the Dauphin, afterwards Louis XL, then residing at the latter place, caused the bones to be gathered together and sent to Bourges, where they long remained objects of public curiosity in the interior of the Sainte-Chapelle. In 1564 a similar discovery took place in the same neighbourhood. Two peasants observed on the banks of the Rhone, along a slope, some great bones sticking out of the ground. They carried them to the neighbouring village, where they were examined by Cassanion, who lived at Valence. It was no doubt apropos to this that Cassanion wrote his treatise " De Gigan-tibus." The description given by the author of a tooth sufficed, according to Cuvier, to prove that it belonged to an Elephant; it was a foot in length, and weighed eight pounds. It was also on the banks of the Rhone, but in Dauphiny, as we have seen, that the
skeleton of the famous Teutobocchus, of which we have spoken in a previous chapter, was found.
In 1663 Otto de Guericke, the illustrious inventor of the air-pump, witnessed the discovery of the bones of an Elephant, buried in the shelly limestone, or Muschelkalk. Along with it w^ere found its enormous tusks, which should have sufficed to establish its zoological origin. Nevertheless they were taken for horns, and the illustrious Leibnitz composed, out of the remains, a strange animal, carrying a horn in the middle of its forehead, and in each jaw a dozen molar teeth a foot long. Having fabricated this fantastic animal, Leibnitz named it also — he called it the fossil wiicorii. In his " Protogasa," a work remarkable besides as the first attempt at a theory of the earth, Leibnitz gave the description and a drawing of this imaginary animal. During more than thirty years the unicorn of Leibnitz was universally accepted throughout Germany; and nothing less than the discovery of the entire skeleton of the Mammoth in the valley of the Unstrut was required to produce a change of opinion. This skeleton was at once recognised by Tinzel, librarian to the Duke of Saxe-Gotha, as that of an Elephant, and was established as such; not, however, without a keen controversy with adversaries of all kinds.
In 1700 a soldier of Wiirtemberg accidentally observed some bones showing themselves projecting out of the earth, in an argillaceous soil, near the city of Canstadt, not far from the banks of the Necker. Having addressed a report to the reigning Duke, the latter caused the place to be excavated, which occupied nearly six months. A veritable cemetery of elephants was discovered, in which were not less than sixty tusks. Those which were entire were preserved; the fragments were abandoned to the court physician, and they became a mere vulgar medicine. In the last century the fossil bones of bears, which were abundant in Germany, were administered in that country medicinally, as an absorbent, astringent, and sudorific. It v/as then called by the German doctors the Ebiir fossilc, or Unicormc fossile, Licorn fossil. The magnificent tusks of the Mammoth found at Canstadt helped to combat fever and colic. What an intelligent man this court physician of Wiirtemberg must have been!
Numerous discoveries like those we have quoted distinguished the 1 8th century; but the progress of science has now rendered such mistakes as we have had to relate impossible. These bones were at length universally recognised as belonging to an Elephant, but erudition now intervened, and helped to obscure a subject which was otherwise perfectly clear. Some learned pedant declared that the bones found in Italy and France were the remains of the Elephants
which Hannibal brought from Carthage with the army in his expedition against the Romans. The part of France where the most ancient bones of these Elephants were found is in the environs of the Rhone, and consequently on the route of the Carthaginian general, and this consideration appeared to these terrible savants to be a particularly triumphant answer to the naturalist's reasonuig. Again, at a later period, Domitius ^^nobarbus conducted the Carthaginian armies, which were followed by a number of Elephants, aniied for war. Cuvier scarcely took the trouble to refute this insignificant objection. It is merely necessary to read, in his learned dissertation, of the number of elephants which could remain to Hannibal when he had entered Gaul. But the best reply that can be made to this strange objection raised by the learned, is to show how extensively these fossil bones of Elephants are scattered, not in Europe only, but over the world — there are few regions of the globe in which their remains are not found. In the north of Europe, in Scandinavia, in Ireland, in Belgium, in Germany, in Central Europe, in Poland, in Middle Russia, in South Russia, in Greece, in Italy, in Africa, in Asia, and, as we have seen, in England. In the New World remains of the Mammoth are also met with. What is most singular is that these remains exist more especially in great numbers in the north of Europe, in the frozen regions of Siberia — regions altogether uninhabitable for the Elephant in our days. " There is not," says Pallas, " in all Asiatic Russia, from the Don to the extremity of the promontory of Tchutchis, a stream or river, especially of those which flow in the plains, on the banks of which some bones of Elephants and other animals foreign to the climate have not been found. But in the more elevated regions, the primitive and schistose chains, they are wanting, as are marine petrifactions. But in the lower slopes and in the great muddy and sandy plains, above all, in places which are swept by rivers and brooks, they are always found, which proves that we should not the lees find them throughout the whole extent of the country if we had the same means of searching for them."
Every year in the season when thaw takes place, the vast rivers which descend to the Frozen Ocean in the north of Siberia sweep down with their waters numerous portions of the banks, and expose to view bones buried in the soil and in the excavations left by the rushing waters. Cuvier gives a long list of places in Russia in which
interesting discoveries have been made of Elephants' bones; and it is certainly curious that the more we advance towards the north in Russia the more numerous and extensive do the bone depositories z 2
become. In spite of the oft-repeated and undoubted testimony of numerous travellers, we can scarcely credit the statements made respecting some of the islands of the glacial sea near the poles, situated opposite the mouth of the Lena and of the Indighirka, Here, for example, is an extract from " Billing's Voyage " concerning these isles: " The whole island (which is about thirty-three leagues in length), except three or four small rocky mountains, is a mixture of ice and sand; and as the shores fall, from the heat of the sun's-thawing them, the tusks and bones of the mammont are found in
great abundance. To use Chvoinoif's own expression, the island is formed of the bones of this extraordinary animal, mixed with the horns and heads of the buffalo, or something like it, and some horns of the rhinoceros." New Siberia and the Lachow Islands off the mouth of the river Lena, are, for the most part, only an agglomeration of sand, ice, and
Elephants' teeth. At every tempest the sea casts ashore new quantities of mammoths' tusks, and the inhabitants of Siberia carry on a profitable commerce in this fossil ivory. Every year, during the summer, innumerable fishermen's barks direct their course towards this isle of bones; and, during winter, immense caravans take the same route, all the convoys drawn by dogs, returning charged with the tusks of the Mammoth, each weighing from 150 to 200 pounds. The fossil ivory thus withdrawn from the frozen north is imported into China and Europe, where it is employed for the same purposes as ordinary ivory, which is furnished, as we know, by the existing Elephant and Hippopotamus of Africa and Asia.