Henry H. Howorth
1887
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Georges Cuvier was one of the first to propose that Classical and medieval references to the discovery of giants' bones were mistaken identifications of the fossils of extinct elephants and other prehistoric mammals. Later writers expanded on his insight, offering new and interesting details about the fossil origins of fabulous beings from myth and legend.
Henry H. Howorth (1842-1923) was a conservative member of the British parliament who also was an amateur historian and geologist. He disagreed vehemently with uniformitarian geology and the growing consensus that there had once been an Ice Age. To refute such claims, in his 1887 book The Mammoth and the Flood he proposed that ancient mammals like the mammoth had been killed by a massive flood akin to the Flood of Noah. The first chapter of this examination reviewed the evidence for the role of fossils in sparking myths and legends of remarkable creatures like griffins and giants. This account, which anticipated almost point for point the argument of Adrienne Mayor in The First Fossil Hunters (2001) was one of the most comprehensive examinations of the topic published in the nineteenth century and appears below. |
CHAPTER I.
THE NAME AND LEGENDARY HISTORY OF THE MAMMOTH AND ITS COMPANIONS.
“Grandisque effossis mirabitur ossa sepulchris.”
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Etymology of the name Mammoth—Its identity with Behemoth—Arah intercourse with Siberia—Griffons and their claws—Siberian legends about them—Traced to remains of fossil rhinoceros—Griffons in classical and medieval times—Proof of early intercourse with Siberia—Fossil unicorn— Dragons’ bones in Europe and China—Indian fabulous beasts—Stories of giants traced to discovery of bones of Mammoths, &c.—Giants known to the Ancients—Famous discoveries of giants’ remains in mediæval times.
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There is perhaps no inquiry in the whole range of Natural History more fascinating and romantic than that which deals with the Mammoth and its surroundings. Even children and unsophisticated people have their imagination stirred when they read how in the dreary and inhospitable wastes of Northern Siberia, where neither tree nor shrub will grow, where the land for hundreds of miles is covered with damp moss barely sprinkled for two months with a few gay flowers, and during the rest of the year is locked in ice and snow, and where only the hardiest of polar animals, the white fox and the polar hare, the raven and the snowy owl, can live, there are found below the ground huge hoards of bones of elephants and other great beasts whose appetites needed corresponding supplies of food. But our interest rises to the highest pitch, when we are told that this vast cemetery not only teems with fresh bones and beautiful tusks of ivory, but with the carcases and mummies of these great animals so well preserved in the perpetually frozen soil that the bears and wolves can feed upon them.
Such stories almost invite credulity, and when credulity is dissipated, they as naturally arouse the elementary philosophical instincts of our nature; and whether we be trained in the ways of science or no, we are constrained to ask, How and why are these things so? The discussion, if not the solution, of this problem is the object of the following pages.
I will begin with a small etymological question which, like everything else connected with the Mammoth, has a certain romantic interest.
In the year 1666, a learned Dutchman named Cornelius Witzen, who became burgomaster of Amsterdam, visited Moscow. From the materials he there collected, and from various other sources, he compiled a famous work, entitled “Noord en Oost Tartarye,” of which the first edition appeared in 1694. In this work the name Mammoth occurs for the first time in Western Europe. Witzen describes how numbers of elephants’ teeth are found on the banks of the Siberian rivers, and adds, “By the Inlanders” (meaning the Russian settlers in Siberia) “these teeth are called Mammouttekoos, while the animal itself is called Mammout.” In the Grammatiai Russica of Ludolf, published in 1696, p. 96, these bones are called Mammotovoikost.
Among the Russians the name is invariably now spelt with an “n.” [1] This is an old corruption, since J. B. Müller in 1716 says, “The inhabitants call the beast Mamant.” Sehiefuer explains it as due to a confusion made by the Russian peasants between the name Mammoth and that of Saint Mamas, who is called Mamant by the Russians, and to whom the second of September is specially dedicated. [2]
Pallas derives the name Mammoth from mama, which he says means earth in the Tartar tongue,[3] but as Baer urges, in the great Polyglot edited by Pallas himself, in which the various Tartar dialects are illustrated, no such word as mama occurs as a synonym for earth. Baer himself suggests a Finnish or Ugrian etymology for the name. In this class of languages ma means earth, while in one of its branches, the Esthonian, mut or muit means mole. Ho accordingly argued that the name meant originally earth-mole. [4] Not only is this an inconsequential etymology, since all moles live underground, but the notion of finding on etymology for the name among a people so far removed from Siberia as the Esthonians is quite fanciful.
Klaproth says he was told by the Buriat and Mongol lamas, whom he consulted in 1806 when he travelled in Siberia, that the name Mammoth is of Tibetan origin. This again is a most unlikely quarter in which to look for an etymology. The true explanation of the name was long ago pointed out by Strahlenberg, one of Peter the Great’s Swedish prisoners, who was exiled to Siberia, and who wrote an interesting account of the Russian Empire at the end of the 17th century.
In the 13th chapter of this work, as presented to us in the quaint and racy English translation, we read, “As to the name, it doubtless had its origin from the Hebrew and Arabic, this word denoting Behemot, of which Job speaks, and which the Arabs pronounce Mehemot This is certain, that they (i.e. the Arabs) brought the word into Great Tartary, for the Ostiacks near the river Oby call the Mammoth Khosar, and the Tartars call it Khir, and although the Arabian name of an elephant is Fyhl, yet if very large they add the adjective Mehemodi to it; and these Arabs coming into Tartary, and finding there the relics of some monstrous great beasts, not certain of what kind they might be, they called these teeth Mehemot, which afterwards became a proper name among the Tartars, and by the Russians is corruptly pronounced Mammoth. The Russian Mammoth certainly came from the word Behemot, in which opinion I am confirmed by the testimony of an ancient Russian priest, Gregory by name, Father Confessor to Princess Sophia, who was many years an exile in Siberia, from whom 1 was told that formerly the name for these bones in Siberia was not Mammoth but Memoth, and that the Russian dialect had made that alteration.” [5]
This view is curiously confirmed by the fact that Father Avril, a Jesuit, who went overland to China in 1685, and who is quoted by Witzen, never calls the animal Mammoth, but always Behemot. [6] Witzen also speaks of “the beast Behemoth, called Mammout, otherwise Mammona by the Russians.” [7] The Turks habitually interchange the consonants B and M, so that the change from Behemoth to Mammoth is perfectly regular.
At first it looks strange that the Arabs should have given a name to this Siberian animal which has become current everywhere, but the fact is, that in the 10th and 11th centuries they were the most enterprising commercial race in the world, and we know from other sources that their traders and emissaries frequented the border-lands of Siberia, and probably initiated the trade in fossil ivory. On the Middle Volga was a famous principality called Great Bulgaria, represented by the modern government of Kazan. Its name still survives in the little village of Bolghari on that river. The Khalif Muktadir, who reigned from 907 to 932 A.D., sent an envoy named Ibn Fozlan to the king of Bulgaria, and we have interesting notices of the district preserved in the geographical compilations of the Arab geographers, such as Kazvini, Yakut, &c. Most of these notices of Bulgaria date probably from before 909, when that district was devastated by the Russian pirates.
In one of these accounts we read that in that country were found bones of an immense size. One traveller reports having seen a tooth two palms in width, and four in length, and a skull resembling an Arab hut, and teeth like those of an elephant, white as snow, and weighing as much as 200 menns. It was not known to what animal they belonged, but they were taken to Khuarazm (i.e. Khiva), where they were sold at a great price. Out of them were made combs, vases, and other objects such as were made out of ivory. [8] This Eastern trade in fossil ivory apparently continued to our own day, for Father Avril tells us how objects made from it were supposed to have a peculiar virtue as styptics, and that the Persians and Turks who bought them set a high value upon them, and preferred a scimitar or dagger hafted with this precious ivory rather than with a gold or silver handle.
Having fixed the etymology of the name Mammoth, and traced it to the Arabs, we may next turn to some of the romantic legends which surround it, and its almost constant companion, the woolly rhinoceros.
In the year 807, some envoys whom Charlemagne had sent a few years before to the famous Khalif of the Arabian Nights, Harun ar Rashid, returned, accompanied by an ambassador from Harun, named Abdulla, bearing with him some lordly presents, including a living elephant, a splendid tent, an elaborate water-clock, Eastern unguents, spices, &c., &c. In addition to these prosaic if very valuable objects were two others, of a more interesting kind to us, namely, the horn of a unicorn and the claw of a griffon. These were long preserved at St. Denis, and were described in a work published at Paris in 1646, entitled “Le Trésor Sacré de St. Denys, ou inventoire des Sainctes reliques, &c.” Among the objects described in this work is a griffon’s claw, set on a griffon’s foot, made of silver gilt, having at its point a small ball, on which was a bird. The whole, except the claw, was of silver gilt, ornamented with an amethyst. “This piece,” says the description, “is admirable, for the claw is quite natural, and so large and wide that in its hollow it holds a pint of wine of the measure of St. Denis, whence it may be judged that the griffon, or other bird to which it belonged, was of a prodigious size. With it was a piece of licorne, six and a half feet long, and probably the finest in Europe. These objects, which had been sent by Aaron, king of Persia (sic), to Charlemagne, with other rich presents, had been presented by his son Charles le Chauve to St. Denis.” [9] The horn of the unicorn here mentioned was the object of an elaborate inquiry at the Hague, in 1646, described in Churchill’s Collection of Travels.
In this notice we are told that the horn was altogether like a similar one at Copenhagen, and that the Danes were of opinion that these kind of horns found in Muscovy, Germany, Italy, and France, came from Denmark. The Danes sold the horns as unicorn’s horns. The one at St. Denis had the same root as the rest, hollow and worm-eaten at the end, like a rotten tooth. “This being granted,” says the old writer, “as it is really true, I will positively assert it to be a tooth fallen out of the same fish known in Iceland by the name of Narwhal, and that consequently it is no horn.” Although the narwhal is apparently not now found in the seas about Nova Zembla, it was so formerly, and Schmidt in his recent journey to the Yenissei saw such a narwhal’s tooth in the possession of a fur merchant named Sotnikof at Dudinsk.
Let us now turn to the griffon’s claw, which introduces us to a wide world of curious speculation. Similar objects are not unfrequently mentioned among the treasures preserved in the sacristies of great churches. They are generally mounted in silver, and stand upon representations of birds’ feet, showing what they were popularly deemed to be.
Such claws have been described from the sacristies of churches at Vienna, Wittenberg, and Halle. [10] One at Paris is referred to by Gesner, who says it was reported to have been brought from Rhodes or Malta. There is a fine specimen in the British Museum, and another at C.C.C., Cambridge. The names of the three Magi, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, engraved on some examples, point to their Eastern origin. In many cases they are doubtless the horns of some bovine animal, but these are not the real griffon’s claws, but only an imitation. The nature and origin of the real ones was first definitely made out by the Siberian traveller, Erman.
In describing the remains of the woolly rhinoceros from Siberia in the Museum of the St. Petersburg Academy, he says, “The skull, owing to its great length and the arching of the upper jaw, has some resemblance to that of a bird, and may perhaps have given rise to the fables which now circulate among the Yukagirs on the shores of the Icy Sea, respecting a colossal bird of old times, the bones of which are said to be occasionally met with.” [11]
Again, speaking of the Samoyedes, he says, “By comparing numbers of the bones of antediluvian pachyderms, which are thrown up in such quantities on the shores of the Polar Sea, all these people have got so distinct a notion of a colossal bird, that the compressed and sword-shaped horns, for example, of the rhinoceros tichornius are never called, even among the Russian promuishleniks and merchants, by any other name than that of ‘birds’ claws.’ The indigenous tribes, however, and the Yukagirs in particular, go much further, for they conceive that they find the Lead of this mysterious bird in the peculiarly vaulted cranium of the same rhinoceros; its quills in the leg-bones of other pachyderms, of which they usually make their quivers; but as to the bird itself, they plainly state that their forefathers saw it, and fought wondrous battles with it: just as the mountain Samoyedes preserve to this day the tradition that the mammoth still haunts the sea-shore, dwelling in the recesses of the mountains, and feeding on the dead.”
Erman, [12] again speaking of the rhinoceros horns found in Siberia, says, “Thin plates, cut from these horns, are elastic in the highest degree. They are, therefore, sought for eagerly by the Yukagirs, and, like the cows’ horns among the Buriuts, and resinous wood among the Ostiaks, are used to line their bows. The attention of the people is, therefore, turned upon this memorial of the antediluvian world more than upon any other; and the nomad geologists of the Icy Sea have arrived at the conclusion that these horns are the talons or claws of gigantic birds, which were more ancient than the Yukagir tribe, and in former times fought with the latter for the possession of the tundras. . . . When I told them of the rhinoceros, they said that they had often heard all about it, but that they always called the horns in question birds’ claws, and saw no reason to change their custom.” [13]
Erman is not the only author who reports these stories. Baer tells us that the traveller Hedenstrom, whom he saw at St. Petersburg after his return from Siberia, in 1830, spoke of the horns and skulls of the rhinoceros he had with him as the claws and skulls of great birds, and apparently remained unconvinced by Baer’s arguments to the contrary, since he reasserted the fact in his later writings. [14]
Bestuschef, a Siberian exile, in his interesting narrative, speaking of the remains of the rhinoceros, says that “the natives speak of it as a gigantic bird which once wasted their country. To free themselves from its attacks, one of these ingenious people fastened an iron spear on the top of a pine-tree, on which the bird impaled itself, and was thus killed.” [15]
This makes it fairly clear that the griffon’s claws which were so much treasured in the middle ages, and notably the one sent by the Khalif to Charlemagne, were rhinoceros horns, and that the latter, like the narwhal’s tooth which accompanied it, came from the north of Asia. But this conclusion involves some others, for it carries back the knowledge, direct or indirect, of Northern Asia and of its products to a much earlier period than has been commonly supposed.
The search for gold has always proved a wonderful loadstone for adventurous men. It probably took the Phœnicians to Spain and Britain, as it led to the colonization of the Spanish Main and largely of Australia in later times. So far as we can discover, the chief sources of gold in early Greek times were the streams of Asia Minor, and in a much larger degree the flanks of the Ural Mountains; and the famous Greek colonies in the north of the Euxine were the principal entrepots of the early world for furs and gold. The Crimea was known as the Golden Chersonese. The so-called Scythian graves in the north of the Euxiue are famous for their profuse stores of gold, and Heeren long ago urged that a well-established caravan route connected this region with North-Eastern Europe and Western Siberia.
Those who sought for gold, would speedily find other and more curious things, for the gold is there found in beds of gravel, in which also occur the remains of the great extinct beasts, the Mammoth and the Rhinoceros, and we are told the indigenous Bashkirs attach a superstitious feeling of respect to these bones, and have been known to say to the Russian miners who first settled among them, “Take from us our gold if you will, but for God’s sake leave us the bones of our ancestors.” [16]
The finding of gold and these remains including the so-called birds’ claws together, no doubt suggested the notion that the griffons guarded the gold. As Erman remarks, “It must be allowed to be strictly true that the metal-finders of the Northern Urals draw the gold from under the griffons; for gold sand lying under the formations of earth and peat which are filled with these fossil remains, is at the present day a very common phenomenon.”
It shows how exceedingly conservative the notions of uncivilized folk are, and it also startles us by its novelty to find these same stories, drawn no doubt from the same sources, told in the earlier pages of Greek history. The first traveller who visited the gold-mining district of the Urals, and whose narrative is recorded, was Aristeas the son of Caystrobius, a native of Proconesus, a small island now called Marmora, and which gives its name to the Sea of Marmora. He is supposed to have flourished about the year 580 B.C. He wrote a poem called the Arimaspeia, of which fragments are preserved, the most important one being that given by Herodotus. In this he tells us that, inspired by Phœbus (or Apollo), he travelled as far as the Issedones, beyond whom were the Arimaspi, beyond them again the Gold-guarding Griffons, and, lastly, beyond these the Hyperboreans, who extended to the sea. [17] In another passage Herodotus tells us that the north of Europe was much richer than any other region in gold, and it was affirmed that the Arimaspi took this gold away by violence from the griffons. [18] By the north of Europe, as Rawlinson and other commentators on Herodotus have shown, the latter meant the gold-bearing district of the Urals. Æschylus, probably relying on Aristeas, makes Prometheus warn men against the griffons, “mute dogs of Jove with eagle-like beaks, and the one-eyed Arimaspians who dwelt round the gold-streaming river of Pluto.” [19]
Pausanias says that the griffons were reported by Aristeas to have fought for gold with the Arimaspians, and that they were like lions, but with the wings and beaks of eagles. [20] Pliny, Pomponius Mela, Clement of Alexandria, and Apuleius all mention the griffon, probably deriving their information from the same sources.
Ctesias, the inventor of so many fables that have passed as history, developed a most marvellous description of the griffon, which may be quoted as a curiosity from the fragments of that very mendacious author preserved by Ælian, Photius, &c. In these the griffon is described as a quadruped in shape like a lion and, like it, having strong claws. Its back was covered wit1i black feathers, and its breast with red ones, while its wings were white. Its head was blue, and its beak like that of an eagle. Its eyes sparkled like fire. It made its nest in the mountains. The Bactrians reported that the griffons were the guardians of the gold. The Indians, on the other hand, asserted that they merely lived where the gold was found, and that they attacked those who went in search of it in defence of their nestlings. The griffons, Ctesias adds, could easily vanquish other animals, except the lion and the elephant. Those who went to dig for gold, therefore, worked at night for greater safety. The region where the griffons lived was very desert. People went to dig gold there in parties of a thousand or two thousand, taking with them mattocks and sacks. They worked when there was no moon, in the first place for greater safety, and in the second, that they might more easily secrete their gold. [21] In regard to the habitat of the griffons, Solinus makes them live in Asiatic Scythia. [22] Claudian connects them with the Riphean Mountains and the worship of Apollo, and speaks of them as Gryphes hyperborei. [23] Servius, the scholiast on Virgil, makes them live in the mountains of the Hyperboreans. [24] Stephen of Byzantium says they guarded the gold among the Taskins, a Hyperborean people. [25] Prisons, writing in the 6th century A.D., in describing the migration of the Avars from Central Asia, tells us they were forced to migrate partially by the attacks of a great multitude of savage griffons, which fed on human beings, and which were previously unknown. [26]
These notices concur in deriving the griffons from Northern Asia, and in making it pretty certain that the Greek Myth was in fact identical with the Samoyede Saga. From the Greeks it passed through Servius and Isidore into mediaeval literature, and the griffon occupies a notable place in the natural histories of the middle ages, such as that of Albertus Magnus, who tells us that its eggs were made of agate and that the animal was hostile to men and horses, and had long claws which were made into goblets. These were as big as ox-horns, and the creature itself was larger than eight lions. Of its feathers were made bows, arrows, and lances. [27]
The griffon occurs frequently in ancient art. Herodotus tells us that about 640 B.C. the Samians ordered a bronze bowl to be made, which was decorated with projecting griffons’ heads. [28] It occurs as a symbol on the very early coins of Phocaea, Assos, Teos and its colony Abdera, but is especially frequent in the remains of the Greek colonies north of the Euxine, occurring on the coins of Cherrouesus and Pauticapreum, and on the vases, &c., found on the site of the latter place, while Herodotus tells us a splendid palace built by the king of the Borysthenites was decorated with sphinxes and griffons in white marble. [29]
This again takes us towards the gold district of the old world. Griffons were apparently connected with the worship of Apollo and the Sun, to whose car they are represented sometimes as harnessed, and Diodorus tells us Apollo was especially worshipped by the Hyperboreans. The animals were also well known among the Persians. They are represented on the walls of Persepolis, while Hipparchus tells us they were a favourite ornament on Persian tapestries, &c. [30]
They were possibly known in very early times, for we are told they are represented on one of the golden baskets figured on a representation of Rameses III., i.e. in the 13th century B.C., and that the Egyptians had a special name, Akheth, for the animal. [31] If a scholiast on the Prometheus of Æschylus is to be credited, Hesiod also referred to griffons and their guardianship of gold. [32]
The facts here reported may perhaps point out to some of my readers for the first time the importance of sifting the real meaning of those fantastic old-world myths which we are apt to treat as mere puerilities when we see them painted in vermilion on some herald’s handiwork, or standing sentinel over the site of Temple Bar. For they enable us to bring into close contact at a very early date such remote districts as Siberia and the Mediterranean border, and to show that the fossil remains which still attract our wonder had even then become objects of special solicitude and interest.
Griffons were not the only fabulous animals to which such bizarre remains were attributed.
It was the fashion of doctors in early and mediaeval times to use as medicine various kinds of natural products, and it seems that the more strange and curious their origin, the more efficacious was the remedy. This was the case with the so-called horn of the unicorn, and more than one work is before me in which its virtues are set out at length, notably one entitled “De Unicornu Observationes” by Th. Bartholinus. In this as elsewhere, besides the natural narwhal’s tooth, we have described fossil bones found in caverns and elsewhere, which were apparently known as fossil unicorn (Unicornu fossile), and were much esteemed. [33] One of the caves in the Hertz is still known as the Unicorn’s Den (Einhornshöhle). [34]
Some mediaeval writers, again, styled these remains dragons’ bones. This was the case, inter alias, with Hayn, who described and figured a number of bones from caves in 1672, and with H. Vollgrad, who went so far as to declare that both true flying and living dragons, as well as dead ones, still existed in Transylvania. [35] The fact of caves abounding in fossil remains probably gave greater colour to the legend.
These remains were known as dragons’ bones (Lung ku) in China as well as in Europe, and in both countries were used in medicine. In the “Pentsao kangmu” they are said to be found in the banks of rivers in the land of Tsin (the old name of Shansi east of the Yellow River), and also in caverns on the steep banks of the streams flowing from Taishan (a mountain of Shansi), where the dragons lived. Another account says the greatest number of dragons’ bones come from Liang, Yi and Pa, places in the same province. The best ones, however, come from the districts of Shenchau, Tsangchau, and Thaiyuan in Shansi. When they were delicate and had broad flutings, they were treated as having belonged to the female dragon; when strong and finely fluted, to the male; and those having the five colours on them (i.e. yellow, red, white, black, and green) were deemed the most precious. Dragons’ bones, we are further told, came abundantly from Hotung (i.e. the district east of the Yellow River), and during the spring floods the river deposited such remains which were collected by the inhabitants, and used in medicine, and a defile through which the Yellow River forced itself was called the Lung men, i.e. the dragon-gates, probably from the number of such bones that accumulated there.
From the plates which accompany the notice of these dragons’ bones in the “Pen tsao kangmu,” it would seem that some of them were the horns and bones of deer, while in the similar figures in the “Ta kuan pen tsao” are two which are clearly tusks, and probably therefore derived from Mammoths. [36]
Similar legends have arisen in more southern latitudes of the old world. Thus Torrens reports in his account of Ladakh, how the fossil remains of the Sivalik Hills are treated by the natives as slain Rakis, the gigantic Rakshasas of Indian mythology. [37]
Dr. Falconer, again, [38] would connect the huge elephant-fighting and world-bearing tortoises of the Hindoo mythology with a recollection of the time when his monstrous Himalayan tortoise, the Colossochelys Atlas, was still alive. [39] The stories of the Garuda, or king of the birds of Indian legends, and the rokh of the Arabs, which Marco Polo identifies with the griffon, may be compared with these tales.
While popular imagination clothed the strange remains found under the ground with these various shapes, legends of another kind arose from the finding of gigantic bones which seemed to simulate those of the human skeleton.
It was natural that unsophisticated men should not only treat these immense bones as proofs of the former existence of giants, but should also found upon them mythological tales. The enormous bones found in caves and buried under great rocks gave rise most probably to the stories of the Gigantes and the Titans, who fought with the Gods, and whom the Gods overwhelmed and buried under great rocks. Such legends were wide-spread, and we may probably trace them in the account of primæval giants in Genesis, which account again became the basis for mediaeval writers to build their deductions upon.
I will now collect some notices of giants which are not uninteresting in themselves, and independently from this discussion.
Pliny tells us how a mountain of the island of Crete having been torn asunder by an earthquake, a body was found there standing upright, forty-six cubits in height. By some it was supposed to have been the body of Orion, while others thought it was that of Otus. “It is generally believed,” he adds, “from what is stated in ancient records, that the body of Orestes, which was disinterred at Tegea by command of an oracle, was seven cubits in height.” [40]
Elsewhere Pliny reports how Marcus Scaurus brought to Rome from Joppa the bones of the monster which was to have devoured Andromeda. [41]
Plutarch tells us that Sertorius opened the grave of the famous Libyan giant Antaeus, the son of Terra, in Africa, and found a skeleton in it which measured sixty cubits in length. [42] Strabo refers to the same discovery, and says, “Gabinius, the Roman historian, indulges in marvellous stories of Mauritania. He speaks of a sepulchre of Antaeus at Lynx, and a skeleton sixty feet in length which Sertorius exposed, and afterwards covered with earth.” [43]
Phlegon of Tralles, who was a freedman of Hadrian, wrote a work in Greek upon wonders, which is printed in the eighth volume of the Thesaurus of Gronovius. In this he tells us how, according to Apollonius, a few years before there was found at Messene a jar made of stone, which was broken open by tempests and bad weather, and in it was found a head three times the size of a human head, and having two teeth in it. On the jar was the inscription “Ideas.” The Messenians thereupon placed the bones in another jar, and carefully preserved it, since they were those of the hero Idas, named by Homer as having fallen under the weapons of Phoebus. [44]
He adds that in Dalmatia, in a certain cave called that of Diana, there were found many bodies whose ribs exceeded sixteen cubits in length. [45]
In chapter x. 14, he says that in the reign of Nero there was a great earthquake, which was widely felt; among other places, in Pontus. The earth was torn asunder, and in it were found several large bodies, whose size astonished the natives, nor did they dare to remove them. As evidence, however, they sent to Rome a single tooth which was more than a foot in length. The messengers showed the tooth to Tiberius, and asked him if he would like to remove the remains. This he deemed would be wrong, but he ordered a certain mathematician named Pulchrus to design a full figure of a size proportional to that of the tooth, which the latter did, and then showed it to the Emperor. Tiberius having seen it, ordered the tooth to be sent back to whence it had come. [46] Phlegon mentions that similar bodies were found at Latrae in Egypt, not disarranged by an earthquake, but lying regularly, and exposed to the air, so that it could be seen which were the femora, &c. In explaining these matters he urges that in the early days of the world Nature was more vigorous, and produced men more after the nature of Gods, but afterwards they shrank in size. [47] “In Rhodes,” he says, “are found bones much larger than those of living men.” [48] Near Athens was an island where, when the Athenians dug the foundations of the fortifications, they found a grave a hundred cubits in length, with an inscription stating it was the tomb of Makroseiris, who had lived five thousand years. [49]
According to Eumachus in his Periogesis, the Carthaginians, when they were surrounding their territory with a ditch, found two skeletons, one twenty-four cubits, and the other twenty-three in length. [50] Theopompus of Sinope, in his work on earthquakes, says that during a certain earthquake in the Cimmerian Bosphorus a hill burst asunder, and some immense bones were disclosed, which, when put together as a human skeleton, were twenty-four cubits in length; and ho adds that the barbarians there threw the bones into the Maeotis. [51]
Philostratus, in his Heroics, says the Lacedemonians found the dead body of Orestes in Nemea, and it was seven cubits long. Again, he says that the bank of the river Orontes was broken, and in it was found Aryades. Some said he was an Ethiopian, and some an Indian. He was thirty cubits long. On Mount Sigeum, not fifty years before his time, was found the body of a giant whom Apollo claimed to have killed when fighting on behalf of Troy. “And when I sailed,” he adds, “to Sigeum, I noticed what had happened to the land, and saw the giant; and many of the people of the Hellespont and the Ionian Sea and all the islands, and in fact all Æolia, took ship to see it. It lay there for two months. The oracle spoke about it, and gave a different account to different people. It stretched over a space of twenty-two cubits, and lay in a rocky cove with its head towards the continent and its feet touching the end of the promontory. There were no signs of dragons there, and none of the bones differed from those of a man.”
Philostratus speaks also of a similar discovery in the island of Cos, which was made by a vine-dresser when digging a vineyard. The ground sounding hollow, they opened it, and found lying there a body twelve cubits long, with a head like a dragon. Protesilaus recommended that they should cover the stranger up again, and pronounced him to have been one of the giants who were cast down from heaven. The one, however, found in Lemnos by Menecrates of Steiria in Attica was the largest. “I saw it,” says Philostratus, “the year before last, when I sailed from Imbros. The bones were no longer in order, the vertebra had been separated from one another, and the ribs had been detached from the vertebra. When you viewed them together as if forming one object, the size seemed frightful. In order to measure the size of the head they poured some wine into it, and two Cretan amphoræ were not big enough to fill it. Towards the south of Imbros was a promontory called Naulachus, where a piece of ground having broken away, disclosed the body of a very large giant. If you disbelieve me,” says the ingenuous Greek, “let us sail there at once, for it is lying there still uncovered, and the voyage is short.” “In the island of Cos,” he says, “were laid up the bones of the giant sons of ‘the Earth,’ the first Meropes, and in Phrygia, the son of Hyllus, son of Heracles, and in Thessaly those of the Aloedes, and you can test there that they were really nine fathoms long. The people of Naples made a wonder of the bones of Alcyoneus. They added that a great number of giants were lying there and at Vesuvius. In Pallene, which the poets called Phlegra, were a large number of bodies of giants who once lived there. Many were uncovered by storms and earthquakes. No shepherd would go there in consequence of the clatter made by the shades which raged about.” [52]
Pausanias tells us that a person had informed him that parts of the grave of Ajax son of Telamon at Salamina had been washed away by the sea, disclosing his bones, whoso size might be imagined from the fact that the patellæ of his knees vied in size with the quoits used by the athletes called Quinquertiones. [53] He goes on to say that among the Milesians was an island called Lade, divided into two parts, one of which was called Asterius, because Asterius the son of Anax, the son of Earth, was buried there, and his dead body was ten cubits long. In the upper Lydia was a large city called the Gates of Temenis. A sepulchre having been torn open by a tempest there, certain bones were exposed to view, which, if it were not for their retaining the shape of human bones, no one would believe from their size to be human. A report was spread among the vulgar that this was the body of Geryon the son of Khrysaor. . . . And they added further that the husbandmen, when ploughing, often met with the horns of oxen, and this because Geryon was reported to have bred very excellent oxen. . . . The historians of Lydian antiquities, however, affirmed that this gigantic corpse was the body of Hyllus, son of Earth. [54]
Pausanias elsewhere tells us how a Roman general having tried to force his way to Antioch by way of the Orontes, and having cut a moat and turned the river into it, when the bed of the river was dried up an earthen urn was found in it more than eleven cubits high, and inside was the body of a man of the same size as the urn. The deity of Claros told the Syrians who consulted this oracle that it was the body of Orontes, who was by birth an Indian. [55]
Suidas sub voce μηνυς speaks of bones of giants found under the church of St. Menas at Constantinople, which the Emperor Anastasius removed to his palace. [56]
St. Augustine, in discoursing about the existence of giants before the deluge, mentions as a proof that he himself with several others had seen at Utica on the sea-shore the grinder of a man so large that if it had been cut into teeth of an ordinary size at least a hundred might have been made from it. [57] Ludovicus Vives, in his commentary on this passage of St. Austin, notices that in the church of St. Christopher at Hispella he was shown a tooth bigger than his fist, which they pretended was one of the teeth of that huge saint, “doubtless on as good ground as that very shoulder-blade Jerome [58] says was shown at Venice as the shoulder-bone of St. Christopher.” [59]
In the history of the conquest of Egypt by Abd al Hakim, we are told that a giant named Auj having been killed by Moses, his body fell across the Nile and made a bridge. Schiltberger, the Bavarian traveller, tells us there was a bridge in Arabia made out of a giant’s leg-bone which united two rocks separated by a deep chasm. Travellers to Arabia had to cross this bridge. A toll was charged, from the proceeds of which oil was bought with which to oil the bone, and thus prevent it decaying. [60] When Bibars the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt sent an embassy to Bereke the Khan of the Golden Horde, the latter asked the envoys if the report was true that there was a giant’s bone thrown across the Nile which served as a bridge. They replied that they had not heard of such a thing. [61]
In 1678 a tooth weighing four pounds and a half was sent from Constantinople to Vienna, and offered for sale to the Emperor for 2000 rix thalers, having previously been valued at 10,000 rix thalers. They pretended it had been found near Jerusalem in a subterranean cavern in the grave of a giant which bore the following inscription in the Chaldee language: “Here lies the Giant Og” (i.e. Og, king of Bashan, whose iron bedstead was nine cubits long and four cubits broad). As the whole story looked very like an imposition, the Emperor ordered that the tooth should be sent back to Constantinople. [62] Wood reports how, according to Father Jerome de Monceaux, the skeleton of a giant ninety-six feet long was found in a wall at Chailliot, near Thessalonica in Macedonia, as he learnt from a letter written to him by Father Jerome de Rhetel, a missionary in the Levant, who stated that this giant’s skull was found entire, and would contain 210 pounds of corn; that a tooth from its lower jaw weighed fifteen pounds, and was seven inches two lines in length; that the smallest bone of one of its feet was equal to it in size, that the arm-bone from the elbow to the wrist was two feet four inches eight lines round, and that two soldiers with their jackets and coats with large sleeves on easily passed their arms thus covered through the cavity of the bone. Quesnel, the French consul at Thessalonica, ordered an account of this skeleton to be drawn up and deposited in the Chancery. He received the principal bones from the Pasha, and purchased the remainder from other people who had secured them. [63] From another account we learn that a lower molar of this creature was seven and a half inches in height, and weighed fifteen pounds, while three other teeth weighed from two to three pounds each. An account of the skeleton, signed by several witnesses, was published by the Abbe Commiers in the “Mercury” for 1692. The discovery took place in 1691. [64] Cuvier adds that in the “Journal de Paris” for June the 9th, 1806, there was an account of the discovery of similar bones at Demotica near Adrianople. [65]
In 1644 there was discovered at Krembs in Lower Austria, as they were enlarging the fortifications, a tooth twenty-three ounces in weight, which was preserved in the same place. The following year the Swedes laid siege to Krembs, and we read how they found the complete skeleton of a giant on the top of an adjoining hill near an old tower. Many of the bones, chiefly those of the head, fell to pieces on exposure, or were broken by the carelessness of the workmen. Some were preserved entire, and were sent to learned men in Poland and Sweden. Among them was a shoulder-blade with an acetabulum big enough to hold a cannon ball. The skull was compared to a round table, and the bones of its arms and forelegs were as thick as a man of ordinary size. One of the grinders, which weighed five pounds, was given to the Jesuits at Krembs; another is figured by Happelius in his “Relationes Curiosæ.[”] [66] It weighed four pounds three ounces Nuremburg measure. [67]
In the year 758, there was found in Bohemia a skeleton whose head could scarcely be compassed by the arms of two men joined together, and whose shin-bones, which so late as 1764 were kept in the castle there, were twenty-six feet long, whence the individual to whom they belonged, it was calculated, was 110 feet long. [68]
Passing to the valley of the Oder, Volksmann, in his “Silesia Subterranea,” speaks of a humerus suspended in the church of Trebnitz, of a femur in that of Breslau, and of a supposed giant disinterred at Liegnitz in digging the foundations of the church, and of which the bones were distributed among the various churches in the country. [69] In the valley of the Vistula have also been found bones which have given rise to stories about giants. [70]
Pontoppidan, in his “History of Norway,” quotes Starkadr’s tooth, which, according to Torfæus, was said to have been used as a bell-clapper, and Eigel Skalligrim’s skull, which the same author says was shown in Iceland as a prodigy both on account of its size and weight. It was so hard that an axe could not pierce it. He also mentions the finding of giants’ bones, and in one case of a human back-bone of immense size.
In 1663, Otto de Guericke, the illustrious inventor of the air-pump, witnessed the discovery of some great bones buried in the shelly limestone or Muschelkalk. With them were found some enormous tusks. These 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 the fossil unicorn. In his “Protogæa,” a work remarkable as being the first attempt at a theory of the earth, he gave a description and drawing of this imaginary being. During more than thirty years the unicorn of Leibnitz was universally accepted throughout Germany. [71]
The Chronicle of Colmar mentions the discovery of the bones of a giant at the village of Hertin, near Basle, in 1267. [72]
Scheuchzer describes the discovery of a giant in tufa near Utikon, in the canton of Zurich.
In 1577 the skeleton of a so-called giant was found near the cloisters of Reyden, in the canton of Lucerne, under an oak-tree which was overturned by a storm. Felix Plater, Professor of Medicine at Basle, described the bones as those of a giant, and designed a human skeleton nineteen feet high to match them, of which a picture is still preserved in the Jesuits’ College at Lucerne. On it is an inscription giving a list of the bones. The people of Lucerne adopted the giant as one of the supporters of the city arms. In 1706 there only remained of these bones a portion of a scapula and a fragment of a wrist-bone, which were examined by Blumenbach and identified as bones of some form of elephant. [73]
To turn to France. In 1456, in the reign of Charles VII., some bones were found by the side of a river in the barony of Crussol, not far from Valence. These are named by several authors, and especially by Cassanion in his treatise on giants. [74] The giant to whom they belonged was supposed to have been fifteen cubits high, and to have been Briatus. The skull alone was two cubits in extent, while a shoulder-blade was six cubits across. Some time after other bones of a similar kind were found near the same place. Cassanion saw these himself, and he gives a particular description of one of the teeth, which leaves little room for doubt that it belonged to some elephant. His words are, “Miræ magnitudinis dentem multa ibidem conspeximus, longitudiuo unius pedis, pondere librarum octo; multa autem oblongior quam crassus visus est, radicesque aliquot habere quibus gingivæ inhærebat. Visa est insuper ea pars qua cibus terebatur aliquantulum concava, latitudine digitorum quatuor.” He adds that a similar tooth was preserved at Charmes, a neighbouring castle.
Shortly after a similar discovery was made of a giant eighteen feet long in the banks of a river running through St. Peirat opposite Valence. The Dauphin, afterwards Louis XI., had the bones removed to Bourges, where they long remained objects of curiosity in the Sainte Chapelle. Kircher says this giant was eighteen feet long. [75] About 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 were also examined by Cassanion, who lived near Valence. [76]
Riolan says in one of his brochures that Dauphiné was filled with such bones, and Cassanion tells us that in 1580 they showed the bones of a giant which had a few years before been found on a hill dominating the town of Tain. A third giant was discovered in 1667, in a meadow near the chateau of Molard in the diocese of Vienne, the teeth of which each weighed ten pounds, and M. de Jussieu told Cuvier he had seen hung in a church at Valence some teeth of an elephant said to be the teeth of a giant. [77]
Wood describes a third discovery of a similar kind made in 1705 near the banks of the Merden, a little river at the foot of the mountain of Crussol. This time the bones were supposed to have belonged to the giant Bucart, the tyrant of the Vivarais, who was slain by an arrow by the Count de Cabillon, his vassal. The Dominicans had a part of the shinbone, with the articulation of the knee, and his figure painted in fresco, with an inscription stating this giant to have been twenty-two and a half feet high. [78]
In 1613 some masons, digging in a field long traditionally known as the Giant’s Field at Langon, near Romans in Lower Dauphiny, discovered, as we are gravely told, sixteen feet below the surface, a brick tomb thirty feet long, twelve feet wide, and eight high, on which was engraved the inscription, “Theutobochus Rex.” When the tomb was opened, a skeleton was disclosed twenty-five and a half feet long, ten feet wide across the shoulders, and five feet deep from the breast to the back. Its teeth were the size of an ox’s foot, and its shin-bone measured four feet in length. Doctor Habicot and others urged that this was the skeleton of the famous Teutobocchus, the king of the Teutons and Cimbri, who was defeated by Marius in 150 B.C.
In 1509 there was found at Rouen, in the ditches near the Jacobins, a stone tomb containing a skeleton, whose skull held a bushel of corn, and whose shin-bone reached up to the girdles of the tallest men, it being about four feet long; consequently the body must have been seventeen or eighteen feet high. Upon the tomb was a plate of copper, engraved, “In this tomb lies the noble and puissant lord, the Chevalier Ricon de Vallemont, and his bones.” [79]
Simon Majolus, in his work entitled “Dierum Canicularium,” Colloq. II., p. 86, tells us how in 1171 a river bank breaking down in England disclosed the bones of a man who must have been fifty feet high. [80]
Ralph of Coggeshall tells us that in King Richard’s time there were found on the sea-shore, at a village called Eadulphnesse in Essex, “two teeth of a certain giant of such a huge bignesse that two hundred such teeth as men have now-a-daies might bee cut out of them.” “These saw I at Coggeshall (quoth hee), and not without wondering;” and, adds Camden, “such another giant-like thing (I wot not what) as this was in the beginning of Queene Elizabeth’s raigne digged up by R. Candish, a gentleman, neere unto this place.” [81]
Mr. Tylor tells us that certain huge jaws and teeth found in excavating on the Hoe at Plymouth were recognized as belonging to the giant Gog Magog, who in old times fought his last fight there against Corneus the eponymous hero of Cornwall. [82]
Weever, in his “Funeral Monuments,” 1631, says that in the cloister of the churchyard of St. Mary Aldermanbury, hanging fastened to a post was the shanke-bone of a man, wondrous great and large in length, twenty-eight inches and a half of assise, with the portraiture of a giant-like person, upon a table with an inscription. [83]
After the great fire in 1066, on pulling down the church of St. Mary Woolchurch, and making the site into a marketplace, was found a huge thigh-bone, which was assumed to have belonged to a woman, and which was afterwards to be seen at the King’s Head Tavern at Greenwich. [84] Collinson, in his “History of Somersetshire,” tells us how in making a well in the parish of Wedmore, in 1670, there were found at a depth of thirteen feet the remains of a giant, which Gibbons, in his discourse on Stonehenge at the end of Langtoft’s Chronicle, identified with one of the Cangick giants, a people supposed to have formerly lived there. The top of the skull was said to have been an inch thick, and one of the teeth was three inches long above the roots, three inches and a quarter round, and after the root was broken off, it weighed three ounces and a half. [85]
These stories are not only mediaeval. F. Buckland reports from Bartlett that an Irish labourer once told him he had discovered the skeleton of a giant in an Irish bog. He described it as placed on its back; the back-bone, the legs, and arms were, he stated, quite perfect, and in his opinion these bones must have been the remains of a person not less than seventeen feet high. [86]
Spanish history, says Figuier, preserves many stories of giants. The pretended tooth of St. Christopher shown at Valencia, 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. [87]
In Italy the stories of the discovery of giants are very numerous. In the reign of the Emperor Henry III., i.e. about the middle of the 11th century, we read that a peasant, when digging near Rome, found a tomb containing a skeleton of a giant. This exceeded the walls of the city in height. The tomb bore an inscription, and the skeleton was held to be that of Pallas, son of Evander, who was killed by Turnus. [88]
In 1342 some peasants, digging the foundations of a house at Trapani in Sicily, broke into a cavern in which they found a seated figure of a gigantic size. They were much frightened, and reported what they had found in the city. The citizens went out to explore, and 300 of them entered the cavern, and found that the giant was not living. He was sitting in a chair, and held in his left hand a staff exceeding a ship’s mast in size, and loaded with 1500 pounds of lead. The figure crumbled into dust on being touched, except three teeth weighing a hundred ounces each. These were suspended in a neighbouring church dedicated to the Annunciation of the Virgin. There was also a piece of the skull which held several bushels of corn, and a thigh-bone. The giant was calculated to be 200 cubits high. Some deemed it to be the skeleton of Erix, son of Brutus and Venus, killed by Heracles, and buried in that mountain; others thought it belonged to Entellus, who had slain a bull at the funeral games held by Æneas after the death of his father Anchises. Others again deemed him to be one of the Cyclops, and more definitely Polyphemus. [89] Kircher reports these facts on the authority of Boccatius in his “Deorum Genealogia,” but argues that the whole account is very much exaggerated, and goes on to say that in 1637 he himself visited Trapani, and sought out the cavern where the giant was reported to have been found, and says it was not more than thirty feet high. [90]
These remains are very common in Sicily, and it is curious to find them referred to in Don Quixote. The barber having asked Don Quixote how big the giant Morgante might have been, said, “Moreover in the island of Sicily there have been found long bones and shoulder-bones so large, that their size manifests their owners to have been giants, and as big as great towers, for this truth geometry sets beyond doubt.” [91]
Fazelus reports how in 1516 a body was found in a field called Gibilo near Mazareno in Sicily, which was twenty cubits high, and the head of which was the size of a hogshead, and each of the teeth weighed five ounces. He also says that at Melilli, between Leontium and Syracuse, there were a great number of sepulchres and gigantic skeletons, and many more in an immense cavern near Hicara. In 1538 a Genoese noble man, searching for antiquities, found near Syracuse a skeleton twenty cubits high, which fell to dust, except the skull, some ribs, part of the thigh-bone, and some teeth, which he took away, and gave to the magistrate of the place. Another skeleton, eighteen cubits long, was found by Paulus Leontinus while digging for nitre near Palermo. It all decayed away, however, except the jaw and some molar teeth, which we are told, were whitish, decayed, and rubbed. They weighed about four ounces each. Fazelus tells us two of them were given to him by Simeone Piglione.
In 1550 some workmen, repairing a tomb at Culatrari near Entella, found a tomb containing a skeleton twenty-two cubits high, which they set up in sport, and then threw stones at until it was destroyed, the teeth alone remaining. [92]
Mongitore and Valguarnera, says Cuvier, report similar stories to these of Fazelus. Targioni quotes a letter written in 1589 by a person named Folchi, in which is a description of the tooth of a giant found with some fossil shells near Syracuse. [93]
Jerome Magius speaks of a body five cubits long dug up near Reggio in making a cistern. [94]
Cuvier tells us of the skeleton of a giant found near Consentina in Calabria, and of which a description was sent to him by Father Luca Mandellus, of the Augustinian order, in a letter which he prints. In this he says the skeleton was found in a tomb in a garden near the church of St. Peter. This tomb was found under the ground, and contained bones of such a length and size that they could only have belonged to a giant. Digging in another place, for there were several chambers connected together, he says, “Nil præter hujusmodi ossa, tibias, id est crura, brachia atque costas ejusdem molis eruimus. Tandem quippiam rotundum lanci aromatariorum prægrandi non absimile conspicatus, idque totis viribus bipalio perfringere conatus, summam calvariæ partem ejusdem cadaveris esse animadverti. Quamobrem in gigantis sepulchrum nos incidisse edocti, repositis ibidem ossibus, regestasque terra solum æquantes fatigati discessimus.” The good father proceeded to inquire whose the bones were, and satisfied himself they belonged to a certain Marducchus, known as the Salernitan giant, who, when Salerno was besieged by the Emperor Henry VI., fought a single combat with Johannes Kala, and having been killed, was there buried. [95]
In the “Journal Littéraire” of the Abbé Nazari and Thomas Cornelio, we read that at Tiriolo, a castle of Upper Calabria, some labourers discovered in a garden an entire skeleton, measuring eighteen Roman feet in length. The head was two feet and a half long; each molar weighed about an ounce and one-third, and each of the other teeth weighed upwards of three-quarters of an ounce. The smallness of the teeth makes it probable the animal was a rhinoceros. [96]
The “Annual Register” for 1765 tells us that not far from Cincona was to be seen an ancient temple called the Great Church, fifteen paces from which was a large oak, commonly called the Giant’s Oak. In digging there lately about this tree, an entire giant’s skeleton of a prodigious size was found. It measured ten Roman palms in length, and its teeth were exactly like those of a large horse. Near this skeleton were found eleven other skeletons, all nearly of the same size. [97]
An Italian journal mentions that in July, 1812, the skeleton of a man ten feet three inches high was dug up in the valley of Mazara in Sicily, where human skeletons of gigantic size had been theretofore found. [98]
The list of giants here given might no doubt be greatly enlarged. It will suffice, however, to show how very widely distributed the finds of immense bones have been in Europe and its borders in early times, and is a fitting introduction to a survey of the gradually increasing knowledge by which the true character of these remains was eventually determined.
Such stories almost invite credulity, and when credulity is dissipated, they as naturally arouse the elementary philosophical instincts of our nature; and whether we be trained in the ways of science or no, we are constrained to ask, How and why are these things so? The discussion, if not the solution, of this problem is the object of the following pages.
I will begin with a small etymological question which, like everything else connected with the Mammoth, has a certain romantic interest.
In the year 1666, a learned Dutchman named Cornelius Witzen, who became burgomaster of Amsterdam, visited Moscow. From the materials he there collected, and from various other sources, he compiled a famous work, entitled “Noord en Oost Tartarye,” of which the first edition appeared in 1694. In this work the name Mammoth occurs for the first time in Western Europe. Witzen describes how numbers of elephants’ teeth are found on the banks of the Siberian rivers, and adds, “By the Inlanders” (meaning the Russian settlers in Siberia) “these teeth are called Mammouttekoos, while the animal itself is called Mammout.” In the Grammatiai Russica of Ludolf, published in 1696, p. 96, these bones are called Mammotovoikost.
Among the Russians the name is invariably now spelt with an “n.” [1] This is an old corruption, since J. B. Müller in 1716 says, “The inhabitants call the beast Mamant.” Sehiefuer explains it as due to a confusion made by the Russian peasants between the name Mammoth and that of Saint Mamas, who is called Mamant by the Russians, and to whom the second of September is specially dedicated. [2]
Pallas derives the name Mammoth from mama, which he says means earth in the Tartar tongue,[3] but as Baer urges, in the great Polyglot edited by Pallas himself, in which the various Tartar dialects are illustrated, no such word as mama occurs as a synonym for earth. Baer himself suggests a Finnish or Ugrian etymology for the name. In this class of languages ma means earth, while in one of its branches, the Esthonian, mut or muit means mole. Ho accordingly argued that the name meant originally earth-mole. [4] Not only is this an inconsequential etymology, since all moles live underground, but the notion of finding on etymology for the name among a people so far removed from Siberia as the Esthonians is quite fanciful.
Klaproth says he was told by the Buriat and Mongol lamas, whom he consulted in 1806 when he travelled in Siberia, that the name Mammoth is of Tibetan origin. This again is a most unlikely quarter in which to look for an etymology. The true explanation of the name was long ago pointed out by Strahlenberg, one of Peter the Great’s Swedish prisoners, who was exiled to Siberia, and who wrote an interesting account of the Russian Empire at the end of the 17th century.
In the 13th chapter of this work, as presented to us in the quaint and racy English translation, we read, “As to the name, it doubtless had its origin from the Hebrew and Arabic, this word denoting Behemot, of which Job speaks, and which the Arabs pronounce Mehemot This is certain, that they (i.e. the Arabs) brought the word into Great Tartary, for the Ostiacks near the river Oby call the Mammoth Khosar, and the Tartars call it Khir, and although the Arabian name of an elephant is Fyhl, yet if very large they add the adjective Mehemodi to it; and these Arabs coming into Tartary, and finding there the relics of some monstrous great beasts, not certain of what kind they might be, they called these teeth Mehemot, which afterwards became a proper name among the Tartars, and by the Russians is corruptly pronounced Mammoth. The Russian Mammoth certainly came from the word Behemot, in which opinion I am confirmed by the testimony of an ancient Russian priest, Gregory by name, Father Confessor to Princess Sophia, who was many years an exile in Siberia, from whom 1 was told that formerly the name for these bones in Siberia was not Mammoth but Memoth, and that the Russian dialect had made that alteration.” [5]
This view is curiously confirmed by the fact that Father Avril, a Jesuit, who went overland to China in 1685, and who is quoted by Witzen, never calls the animal Mammoth, but always Behemot. [6] Witzen also speaks of “the beast Behemoth, called Mammout, otherwise Mammona by the Russians.” [7] The Turks habitually interchange the consonants B and M, so that the change from Behemoth to Mammoth is perfectly regular.
At first it looks strange that the Arabs should have given a name to this Siberian animal which has become current everywhere, but the fact is, that in the 10th and 11th centuries they were the most enterprising commercial race in the world, and we know from other sources that their traders and emissaries frequented the border-lands of Siberia, and probably initiated the trade in fossil ivory. On the Middle Volga was a famous principality called Great Bulgaria, represented by the modern government of Kazan. Its name still survives in the little village of Bolghari on that river. The Khalif Muktadir, who reigned from 907 to 932 A.D., sent an envoy named Ibn Fozlan to the king of Bulgaria, and we have interesting notices of the district preserved in the geographical compilations of the Arab geographers, such as Kazvini, Yakut, &c. Most of these notices of Bulgaria date probably from before 909, when that district was devastated by the Russian pirates.
In one of these accounts we read that in that country were found bones of an immense size. One traveller reports having seen a tooth two palms in width, and four in length, and a skull resembling an Arab hut, and teeth like those of an elephant, white as snow, and weighing as much as 200 menns. It was not known to what animal they belonged, but they were taken to Khuarazm (i.e. Khiva), where they were sold at a great price. Out of them were made combs, vases, and other objects such as were made out of ivory. [8] This Eastern trade in fossil ivory apparently continued to our own day, for Father Avril tells us how objects made from it were supposed to have a peculiar virtue as styptics, and that the Persians and Turks who bought them set a high value upon them, and preferred a scimitar or dagger hafted with this precious ivory rather than with a gold or silver handle.
Having fixed the etymology of the name Mammoth, and traced it to the Arabs, we may next turn to some of the romantic legends which surround it, and its almost constant companion, the woolly rhinoceros.
In the year 807, some envoys whom Charlemagne had sent a few years before to the famous Khalif of the Arabian Nights, Harun ar Rashid, returned, accompanied by an ambassador from Harun, named Abdulla, bearing with him some lordly presents, including a living elephant, a splendid tent, an elaborate water-clock, Eastern unguents, spices, &c., &c. In addition to these prosaic if very valuable objects were two others, of a more interesting kind to us, namely, the horn of a unicorn and the claw of a griffon. These were long preserved at St. Denis, and were described in a work published at Paris in 1646, entitled “Le Trésor Sacré de St. Denys, ou inventoire des Sainctes reliques, &c.” Among the objects described in this work is a griffon’s claw, set on a griffon’s foot, made of silver gilt, having at its point a small ball, on which was a bird. The whole, except the claw, was of silver gilt, ornamented with an amethyst. “This piece,” says the description, “is admirable, for the claw is quite natural, and so large and wide that in its hollow it holds a pint of wine of the measure of St. Denis, whence it may be judged that the griffon, or other bird to which it belonged, was of a prodigious size. With it was a piece of licorne, six and a half feet long, and probably the finest in Europe. These objects, which had been sent by Aaron, king of Persia (sic), to Charlemagne, with other rich presents, had been presented by his son Charles le Chauve to St. Denis.” [9] The horn of the unicorn here mentioned was the object of an elaborate inquiry at the Hague, in 1646, described in Churchill’s Collection of Travels.
In this notice we are told that the horn was altogether like a similar one at Copenhagen, and that the Danes were of opinion that these kind of horns found in Muscovy, Germany, Italy, and France, came from Denmark. The Danes sold the horns as unicorn’s horns. The one at St. Denis had the same root as the rest, hollow and worm-eaten at the end, like a rotten tooth. “This being granted,” says the old writer, “as it is really true, I will positively assert it to be a tooth fallen out of the same fish known in Iceland by the name of Narwhal, and that consequently it is no horn.” Although the narwhal is apparently not now found in the seas about Nova Zembla, it was so formerly, and Schmidt in his recent journey to the Yenissei saw such a narwhal’s tooth in the possession of a fur merchant named Sotnikof at Dudinsk.
Let us now turn to the griffon’s claw, which introduces us to a wide world of curious speculation. Similar objects are not unfrequently mentioned among the treasures preserved in the sacristies of great churches. They are generally mounted in silver, and stand upon representations of birds’ feet, showing what they were popularly deemed to be.
Such claws have been described from the sacristies of churches at Vienna, Wittenberg, and Halle. [10] One at Paris is referred to by Gesner, who says it was reported to have been brought from Rhodes or Malta. There is a fine specimen in the British Museum, and another at C.C.C., Cambridge. The names of the three Magi, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, engraved on some examples, point to their Eastern origin. In many cases they are doubtless the horns of some bovine animal, but these are not the real griffon’s claws, but only an imitation. The nature and origin of the real ones was first definitely made out by the Siberian traveller, Erman.
In describing the remains of the woolly rhinoceros from Siberia in the Museum of the St. Petersburg Academy, he says, “The skull, owing to its great length and the arching of the upper jaw, has some resemblance to that of a bird, and may perhaps have given rise to the fables which now circulate among the Yukagirs on the shores of the Icy Sea, respecting a colossal bird of old times, the bones of which are said to be occasionally met with.” [11]
Again, speaking of the Samoyedes, he says, “By comparing numbers of the bones of antediluvian pachyderms, which are thrown up in such quantities on the shores of the Polar Sea, all these people have got so distinct a notion of a colossal bird, that the compressed and sword-shaped horns, for example, of the rhinoceros tichornius are never called, even among the Russian promuishleniks and merchants, by any other name than that of ‘birds’ claws.’ The indigenous tribes, however, and the Yukagirs in particular, go much further, for they conceive that they find the Lead of this mysterious bird in the peculiarly vaulted cranium of the same rhinoceros; its quills in the leg-bones of other pachyderms, of which they usually make their quivers; but as to the bird itself, they plainly state that their forefathers saw it, and fought wondrous battles with it: just as the mountain Samoyedes preserve to this day the tradition that the mammoth still haunts the sea-shore, dwelling in the recesses of the mountains, and feeding on the dead.”
Erman, [12] again speaking of the rhinoceros horns found in Siberia, says, “Thin plates, cut from these horns, are elastic in the highest degree. They are, therefore, sought for eagerly by the Yukagirs, and, like the cows’ horns among the Buriuts, and resinous wood among the Ostiaks, are used to line their bows. The attention of the people is, therefore, turned upon this memorial of the antediluvian world more than upon any other; and the nomad geologists of the Icy Sea have arrived at the conclusion that these horns are the talons or claws of gigantic birds, which were more ancient than the Yukagir tribe, and in former times fought with the latter for the possession of the tundras. . . . When I told them of the rhinoceros, they said that they had often heard all about it, but that they always called the horns in question birds’ claws, and saw no reason to change their custom.” [13]
Erman is not the only author who reports these stories. Baer tells us that the traveller Hedenstrom, whom he saw at St. Petersburg after his return from Siberia, in 1830, spoke of the horns and skulls of the rhinoceros he had with him as the claws and skulls of great birds, and apparently remained unconvinced by Baer’s arguments to the contrary, since he reasserted the fact in his later writings. [14]
Bestuschef, a Siberian exile, in his interesting narrative, speaking of the remains of the rhinoceros, says that “the natives speak of it as a gigantic bird which once wasted their country. To free themselves from its attacks, one of these ingenious people fastened an iron spear on the top of a pine-tree, on which the bird impaled itself, and was thus killed.” [15]
This makes it fairly clear that the griffon’s claws which were so much treasured in the middle ages, and notably the one sent by the Khalif to Charlemagne, were rhinoceros horns, and that the latter, like the narwhal’s tooth which accompanied it, came from the north of Asia. But this conclusion involves some others, for it carries back the knowledge, direct or indirect, of Northern Asia and of its products to a much earlier period than has been commonly supposed.
The search for gold has always proved a wonderful loadstone for adventurous men. It probably took the Phœnicians to Spain and Britain, as it led to the colonization of the Spanish Main and largely of Australia in later times. So far as we can discover, the chief sources of gold in early Greek times were the streams of Asia Minor, and in a much larger degree the flanks of the Ural Mountains; and the famous Greek colonies in the north of the Euxine were the principal entrepots of the early world for furs and gold. The Crimea was known as the Golden Chersonese. The so-called Scythian graves in the north of the Euxiue are famous for their profuse stores of gold, and Heeren long ago urged that a well-established caravan route connected this region with North-Eastern Europe and Western Siberia.
Those who sought for gold, would speedily find other and more curious things, for the gold is there found in beds of gravel, in which also occur the remains of the great extinct beasts, the Mammoth and the Rhinoceros, and we are told the indigenous Bashkirs attach a superstitious feeling of respect to these bones, and have been known to say to the Russian miners who first settled among them, “Take from us our gold if you will, but for God’s sake leave us the bones of our ancestors.” [16]
The finding of gold and these remains including the so-called birds’ claws together, no doubt suggested the notion that the griffons guarded the gold. As Erman remarks, “It must be allowed to be strictly true that the metal-finders of the Northern Urals draw the gold from under the griffons; for gold sand lying under the formations of earth and peat which are filled with these fossil remains, is at the present day a very common phenomenon.”
It shows how exceedingly conservative the notions of uncivilized folk are, and it also startles us by its novelty to find these same stories, drawn no doubt from the same sources, told in the earlier pages of Greek history. The first traveller who visited the gold-mining district of the Urals, and whose narrative is recorded, was Aristeas the son of Caystrobius, a native of Proconesus, a small island now called Marmora, and which gives its name to the Sea of Marmora. He is supposed to have flourished about the year 580 B.C. He wrote a poem called the Arimaspeia, of which fragments are preserved, the most important one being that given by Herodotus. In this he tells us that, inspired by Phœbus (or Apollo), he travelled as far as the Issedones, beyond whom were the Arimaspi, beyond them again the Gold-guarding Griffons, and, lastly, beyond these the Hyperboreans, who extended to the sea. [17] In another passage Herodotus tells us that the north of Europe was much richer than any other region in gold, and it was affirmed that the Arimaspi took this gold away by violence from the griffons. [18] By the north of Europe, as Rawlinson and other commentators on Herodotus have shown, the latter meant the gold-bearing district of the Urals. Æschylus, probably relying on Aristeas, makes Prometheus warn men against the griffons, “mute dogs of Jove with eagle-like beaks, and the one-eyed Arimaspians who dwelt round the gold-streaming river of Pluto.” [19]
Pausanias says that the griffons were reported by Aristeas to have fought for gold with the Arimaspians, and that they were like lions, but with the wings and beaks of eagles. [20] Pliny, Pomponius Mela, Clement of Alexandria, and Apuleius all mention the griffon, probably deriving their information from the same sources.
Ctesias, the inventor of so many fables that have passed as history, developed a most marvellous description of the griffon, which may be quoted as a curiosity from the fragments of that very mendacious author preserved by Ælian, Photius, &c. In these the griffon is described as a quadruped in shape like a lion and, like it, having strong claws. Its back was covered wit1i black feathers, and its breast with red ones, while its wings were white. Its head was blue, and its beak like that of an eagle. Its eyes sparkled like fire. It made its nest in the mountains. The Bactrians reported that the griffons were the guardians of the gold. The Indians, on the other hand, asserted that they merely lived where the gold was found, and that they attacked those who went in search of it in defence of their nestlings. The griffons, Ctesias adds, could easily vanquish other animals, except the lion and the elephant. Those who went to dig for gold, therefore, worked at night for greater safety. The region where the griffons lived was very desert. People went to dig gold there in parties of a thousand or two thousand, taking with them mattocks and sacks. They worked when there was no moon, in the first place for greater safety, and in the second, that they might more easily secrete their gold. [21] In regard to the habitat of the griffons, Solinus makes them live in Asiatic Scythia. [22] Claudian connects them with the Riphean Mountains and the worship of Apollo, and speaks of them as Gryphes hyperborei. [23] Servius, the scholiast on Virgil, makes them live in the mountains of the Hyperboreans. [24] Stephen of Byzantium says they guarded the gold among the Taskins, a Hyperborean people. [25] Prisons, writing in the 6th century A.D., in describing the migration of the Avars from Central Asia, tells us they were forced to migrate partially by the attacks of a great multitude of savage griffons, which fed on human beings, and which were previously unknown. [26]
These notices concur in deriving the griffons from Northern Asia, and in making it pretty certain that the Greek Myth was in fact identical with the Samoyede Saga. From the Greeks it passed through Servius and Isidore into mediaeval literature, and the griffon occupies a notable place in the natural histories of the middle ages, such as that of Albertus Magnus, who tells us that its eggs were made of agate and that the animal was hostile to men and horses, and had long claws which were made into goblets. These were as big as ox-horns, and the creature itself was larger than eight lions. Of its feathers were made bows, arrows, and lances. [27]
The griffon occurs frequently in ancient art. Herodotus tells us that about 640 B.C. the Samians ordered a bronze bowl to be made, which was decorated with projecting griffons’ heads. [28] It occurs as a symbol on the very early coins of Phocaea, Assos, Teos and its colony Abdera, but is especially frequent in the remains of the Greek colonies north of the Euxine, occurring on the coins of Cherrouesus and Pauticapreum, and on the vases, &c., found on the site of the latter place, while Herodotus tells us a splendid palace built by the king of the Borysthenites was decorated with sphinxes and griffons in white marble. [29]
This again takes us towards the gold district of the old world. Griffons were apparently connected with the worship of Apollo and the Sun, to whose car they are represented sometimes as harnessed, and Diodorus tells us Apollo was especially worshipped by the Hyperboreans. The animals were also well known among the Persians. They are represented on the walls of Persepolis, while Hipparchus tells us they were a favourite ornament on Persian tapestries, &c. [30]
They were possibly known in very early times, for we are told they are represented on one of the golden baskets figured on a representation of Rameses III., i.e. in the 13th century B.C., and that the Egyptians had a special name, Akheth, for the animal. [31] If a scholiast on the Prometheus of Æschylus is to be credited, Hesiod also referred to griffons and their guardianship of gold. [32]
The facts here reported may perhaps point out to some of my readers for the first time the importance of sifting the real meaning of those fantastic old-world myths which we are apt to treat as mere puerilities when we see them painted in vermilion on some herald’s handiwork, or standing sentinel over the site of Temple Bar. For they enable us to bring into close contact at a very early date such remote districts as Siberia and the Mediterranean border, and to show that the fossil remains which still attract our wonder had even then become objects of special solicitude and interest.
Griffons were not the only fabulous animals to which such bizarre remains were attributed.
It was the fashion of doctors in early and mediaeval times to use as medicine various kinds of natural products, and it seems that the more strange and curious their origin, the more efficacious was the remedy. This was the case with the so-called horn of the unicorn, and more than one work is before me in which its virtues are set out at length, notably one entitled “De Unicornu Observationes” by Th. Bartholinus. In this as elsewhere, besides the natural narwhal’s tooth, we have described fossil bones found in caverns and elsewhere, which were apparently known as fossil unicorn (Unicornu fossile), and were much esteemed. [33] One of the caves in the Hertz is still known as the Unicorn’s Den (Einhornshöhle). [34]
Some mediaeval writers, again, styled these remains dragons’ bones. This was the case, inter alias, with Hayn, who described and figured a number of bones from caves in 1672, and with H. Vollgrad, who went so far as to declare that both true flying and living dragons, as well as dead ones, still existed in Transylvania. [35] The fact of caves abounding in fossil remains probably gave greater colour to the legend.
These remains were known as dragons’ bones (Lung ku) in China as well as in Europe, and in both countries were used in medicine. In the “Pentsao kangmu” they are said to be found in the banks of rivers in the land of Tsin (the old name of Shansi east of the Yellow River), and also in caverns on the steep banks of the streams flowing from Taishan (a mountain of Shansi), where the dragons lived. Another account says the greatest number of dragons’ bones come from Liang, Yi and Pa, places in the same province. The best ones, however, come from the districts of Shenchau, Tsangchau, and Thaiyuan in Shansi. When they were delicate and had broad flutings, they were treated as having belonged to the female dragon; when strong and finely fluted, to the male; and those having the five colours on them (i.e. yellow, red, white, black, and green) were deemed the most precious. Dragons’ bones, we are further told, came abundantly from Hotung (i.e. the district east of the Yellow River), and during the spring floods the river deposited such remains which were collected by the inhabitants, and used in medicine, and a defile through which the Yellow River forced itself was called the Lung men, i.e. the dragon-gates, probably from the number of such bones that accumulated there.
From the plates which accompany the notice of these dragons’ bones in the “Pen tsao kangmu,” it would seem that some of them were the horns and bones of deer, while in the similar figures in the “Ta kuan pen tsao” are two which are clearly tusks, and probably therefore derived from Mammoths. [36]
Similar legends have arisen in more southern latitudes of the old world. Thus Torrens reports in his account of Ladakh, how the fossil remains of the Sivalik Hills are treated by the natives as slain Rakis, the gigantic Rakshasas of Indian mythology. [37]
Dr. Falconer, again, [38] would connect the huge elephant-fighting and world-bearing tortoises of the Hindoo mythology with a recollection of the time when his monstrous Himalayan tortoise, the Colossochelys Atlas, was still alive. [39] The stories of the Garuda, or king of the birds of Indian legends, and the rokh of the Arabs, which Marco Polo identifies with the griffon, may be compared with these tales.
While popular imagination clothed the strange remains found under the ground with these various shapes, legends of another kind arose from the finding of gigantic bones which seemed to simulate those of the human skeleton.
It was natural that unsophisticated men should not only treat these immense bones as proofs of the former existence of giants, but should also found upon them mythological tales. The enormous bones found in caves and buried under great rocks gave rise most probably to the stories of the Gigantes and the Titans, who fought with the Gods, and whom the Gods overwhelmed and buried under great rocks. Such legends were wide-spread, and we may probably trace them in the account of primæval giants in Genesis, which account again became the basis for mediaeval writers to build their deductions upon.
I will now collect some notices of giants which are not uninteresting in themselves, and independently from this discussion.
Pliny tells us how a mountain of the island of Crete having been torn asunder by an earthquake, a body was found there standing upright, forty-six cubits in height. By some it was supposed to have been the body of Orion, while others thought it was that of Otus. “It is generally believed,” he adds, “from what is stated in ancient records, that the body of Orestes, which was disinterred at Tegea by command of an oracle, was seven cubits in height.” [40]
Elsewhere Pliny reports how Marcus Scaurus brought to Rome from Joppa the bones of the monster which was to have devoured Andromeda. [41]
Plutarch tells us that Sertorius opened the grave of the famous Libyan giant Antaeus, the son of Terra, in Africa, and found a skeleton in it which measured sixty cubits in length. [42] Strabo refers to the same discovery, and says, “Gabinius, the Roman historian, indulges in marvellous stories of Mauritania. He speaks of a sepulchre of Antaeus at Lynx, and a skeleton sixty feet in length which Sertorius exposed, and afterwards covered with earth.” [43]
Phlegon of Tralles, who was a freedman of Hadrian, wrote a work in Greek upon wonders, which is printed in the eighth volume of the Thesaurus of Gronovius. In this he tells us how, according to Apollonius, a few years before there was found at Messene a jar made of stone, which was broken open by tempests and bad weather, and in it was found a head three times the size of a human head, and having two teeth in it. On the jar was the inscription “Ideas.” The Messenians thereupon placed the bones in another jar, and carefully preserved it, since they were those of the hero Idas, named by Homer as having fallen under the weapons of Phoebus. [44]
He adds that in Dalmatia, in a certain cave called that of Diana, there were found many bodies whose ribs exceeded sixteen cubits in length. [45]
In chapter x. 14, he says that in the reign of Nero there was a great earthquake, which was widely felt; among other places, in Pontus. The earth was torn asunder, and in it were found several large bodies, whose size astonished the natives, nor did they dare to remove them. As evidence, however, they sent to Rome a single tooth which was more than a foot in length. The messengers showed the tooth to Tiberius, and asked him if he would like to remove the remains. This he deemed would be wrong, but he ordered a certain mathematician named Pulchrus to design a full figure of a size proportional to that of the tooth, which the latter did, and then showed it to the Emperor. Tiberius having seen it, ordered the tooth to be sent back to whence it had come. [46] Phlegon mentions that similar bodies were found at Latrae in Egypt, not disarranged by an earthquake, but lying regularly, and exposed to the air, so that it could be seen which were the femora, &c. In explaining these matters he urges that in the early days of the world Nature was more vigorous, and produced men more after the nature of Gods, but afterwards they shrank in size. [47] “In Rhodes,” he says, “are found bones much larger than those of living men.” [48] Near Athens was an island where, when the Athenians dug the foundations of the fortifications, they found a grave a hundred cubits in length, with an inscription stating it was the tomb of Makroseiris, who had lived five thousand years. [49]
According to Eumachus in his Periogesis, the Carthaginians, when they were surrounding their territory with a ditch, found two skeletons, one twenty-four cubits, and the other twenty-three in length. [50] Theopompus of Sinope, in his work on earthquakes, says that during a certain earthquake in the Cimmerian Bosphorus a hill burst asunder, and some immense bones were disclosed, which, when put together as a human skeleton, were twenty-four cubits in length; and ho adds that the barbarians there threw the bones into the Maeotis. [51]
Philostratus, in his Heroics, says the Lacedemonians found the dead body of Orestes in Nemea, and it was seven cubits long. Again, he says that the bank of the river Orontes was broken, and in it was found Aryades. Some said he was an Ethiopian, and some an Indian. He was thirty cubits long. On Mount Sigeum, not fifty years before his time, was found the body of a giant whom Apollo claimed to have killed when fighting on behalf of Troy. “And when I sailed,” he adds, “to Sigeum, I noticed what had happened to the land, and saw the giant; and many of the people of the Hellespont and the Ionian Sea and all the islands, and in fact all Æolia, took ship to see it. It lay there for two months. The oracle spoke about it, and gave a different account to different people. It stretched over a space of twenty-two cubits, and lay in a rocky cove with its head towards the continent and its feet touching the end of the promontory. There were no signs of dragons there, and none of the bones differed from those of a man.”
Philostratus speaks also of a similar discovery in the island of Cos, which was made by a vine-dresser when digging a vineyard. The ground sounding hollow, they opened it, and found lying there a body twelve cubits long, with a head like a dragon. Protesilaus recommended that they should cover the stranger up again, and pronounced him to have been one of the giants who were cast down from heaven. The one, however, found in Lemnos by Menecrates of Steiria in Attica was the largest. “I saw it,” says Philostratus, “the year before last, when I sailed from Imbros. The bones were no longer in order, the vertebra had been separated from one another, and the ribs had been detached from the vertebra. When you viewed them together as if forming one object, the size seemed frightful. In order to measure the size of the head they poured some wine into it, and two Cretan amphoræ were not big enough to fill it. Towards the south of Imbros was a promontory called Naulachus, where a piece of ground having broken away, disclosed the body of a very large giant. If you disbelieve me,” says the ingenuous Greek, “let us sail there at once, for it is lying there still uncovered, and the voyage is short.” “In the island of Cos,” he says, “were laid up the bones of the giant sons of ‘the Earth,’ the first Meropes, and in Phrygia, the son of Hyllus, son of Heracles, and in Thessaly those of the Aloedes, and you can test there that they were really nine fathoms long. The people of Naples made a wonder of the bones of Alcyoneus. They added that a great number of giants were lying there and at Vesuvius. In Pallene, which the poets called Phlegra, were a large number of bodies of giants who once lived there. Many were uncovered by storms and earthquakes. No shepherd would go there in consequence of the clatter made by the shades which raged about.” [52]
Pausanias tells us that a person had informed him that parts of the grave of Ajax son of Telamon at Salamina had been washed away by the sea, disclosing his bones, whoso size might be imagined from the fact that the patellæ of his knees vied in size with the quoits used by the athletes called Quinquertiones. [53] He goes on to say that among the Milesians was an island called Lade, divided into two parts, one of which was called Asterius, because Asterius the son of Anax, the son of Earth, was buried there, and his dead body was ten cubits long. In the upper Lydia was a large city called the Gates of Temenis. A sepulchre having been torn open by a tempest there, certain bones were exposed to view, which, if it were not for their retaining the shape of human bones, no one would believe from their size to be human. A report was spread among the vulgar that this was the body of Geryon the son of Khrysaor. . . . And they added further that the husbandmen, when ploughing, often met with the horns of oxen, and this because Geryon was reported to have bred very excellent oxen. . . . The historians of Lydian antiquities, however, affirmed that this gigantic corpse was the body of Hyllus, son of Earth. [54]
Pausanias elsewhere tells us how a Roman general having tried to force his way to Antioch by way of the Orontes, and having cut a moat and turned the river into it, when the bed of the river was dried up an earthen urn was found in it more than eleven cubits high, and inside was the body of a man of the same size as the urn. The deity of Claros told the Syrians who consulted this oracle that it was the body of Orontes, who was by birth an Indian. [55]
Suidas sub voce μηνυς speaks of bones of giants found under the church of St. Menas at Constantinople, which the Emperor Anastasius removed to his palace. [56]
St. Augustine, in discoursing about the existence of giants before the deluge, mentions as a proof that he himself with several others had seen at Utica on the sea-shore the grinder of a man so large that if it had been cut into teeth of an ordinary size at least a hundred might have been made from it. [57] Ludovicus Vives, in his commentary on this passage of St. Austin, notices that in the church of St. Christopher at Hispella he was shown a tooth bigger than his fist, which they pretended was one of the teeth of that huge saint, “doubtless on as good ground as that very shoulder-blade Jerome [58] says was shown at Venice as the shoulder-bone of St. Christopher.” [59]
In the history of the conquest of Egypt by Abd al Hakim, we are told that a giant named Auj having been killed by Moses, his body fell across the Nile and made a bridge. Schiltberger, the Bavarian traveller, tells us there was a bridge in Arabia made out of a giant’s leg-bone which united two rocks separated by a deep chasm. Travellers to Arabia had to cross this bridge. A toll was charged, from the proceeds of which oil was bought with which to oil the bone, and thus prevent it decaying. [60] When Bibars the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt sent an embassy to Bereke the Khan of the Golden Horde, the latter asked the envoys if the report was true that there was a giant’s bone thrown across the Nile which served as a bridge. They replied that they had not heard of such a thing. [61]
In 1678 a tooth weighing four pounds and a half was sent from Constantinople to Vienna, and offered for sale to the Emperor for 2000 rix thalers, having previously been valued at 10,000 rix thalers. They pretended it had been found near Jerusalem in a subterranean cavern in the grave of a giant which bore the following inscription in the Chaldee language: “Here lies the Giant Og” (i.e. Og, king of Bashan, whose iron bedstead was nine cubits long and four cubits broad). As the whole story looked very like an imposition, the Emperor ordered that the tooth should be sent back to Constantinople. [62] Wood reports how, according to Father Jerome de Monceaux, the skeleton of a giant ninety-six feet long was found in a wall at Chailliot, near Thessalonica in Macedonia, as he learnt from a letter written to him by Father Jerome de Rhetel, a missionary in the Levant, who stated that this giant’s skull was found entire, and would contain 210 pounds of corn; that a tooth from its lower jaw weighed fifteen pounds, and was seven inches two lines in length; that the smallest bone of one of its feet was equal to it in size, that the arm-bone from the elbow to the wrist was two feet four inches eight lines round, and that two soldiers with their jackets and coats with large sleeves on easily passed their arms thus covered through the cavity of the bone. Quesnel, the French consul at Thessalonica, ordered an account of this skeleton to be drawn up and deposited in the Chancery. He received the principal bones from the Pasha, and purchased the remainder from other people who had secured them. [63] From another account we learn that a lower molar of this creature was seven and a half inches in height, and weighed fifteen pounds, while three other teeth weighed from two to three pounds each. An account of the skeleton, signed by several witnesses, was published by the Abbe Commiers in the “Mercury” for 1692. The discovery took place in 1691. [64] Cuvier adds that in the “Journal de Paris” for June the 9th, 1806, there was an account of the discovery of similar bones at Demotica near Adrianople. [65]
In 1644 there was discovered at Krembs in Lower Austria, as they were enlarging the fortifications, a tooth twenty-three ounces in weight, which was preserved in the same place. The following year the Swedes laid siege to Krembs, and we read how they found the complete skeleton of a giant on the top of an adjoining hill near an old tower. Many of the bones, chiefly those of the head, fell to pieces on exposure, or were broken by the carelessness of the workmen. Some were preserved entire, and were sent to learned men in Poland and Sweden. Among them was a shoulder-blade with an acetabulum big enough to hold a cannon ball. The skull was compared to a round table, and the bones of its arms and forelegs were as thick as a man of ordinary size. One of the grinders, which weighed five pounds, was given to the Jesuits at Krembs; another is figured by Happelius in his “Relationes Curiosæ.[”] [66] It weighed four pounds three ounces Nuremburg measure. [67]
In the year 758, there was found in Bohemia a skeleton whose head could scarcely be compassed by the arms of two men joined together, and whose shin-bones, which so late as 1764 were kept in the castle there, were twenty-six feet long, whence the individual to whom they belonged, it was calculated, was 110 feet long. [68]
Passing to the valley of the Oder, Volksmann, in his “Silesia Subterranea,” speaks of a humerus suspended in the church of Trebnitz, of a femur in that of Breslau, and of a supposed giant disinterred at Liegnitz in digging the foundations of the church, and of which the bones were distributed among the various churches in the country. [69] In the valley of the Vistula have also been found bones which have given rise to stories about giants. [70]
Pontoppidan, in his “History of Norway,” quotes Starkadr’s tooth, which, according to Torfæus, was said to have been used as a bell-clapper, and Eigel Skalligrim’s skull, which the same author says was shown in Iceland as a prodigy both on account of its size and weight. It was so hard that an axe could not pierce it. He also mentions the finding of giants’ bones, and in one case of a human back-bone of immense size.
In 1663, Otto de Guericke, the illustrious inventor of the air-pump, witnessed the discovery of some great bones buried in the shelly limestone or Muschelkalk. With them were found some enormous tusks. These 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 the fossil unicorn. In his “Protogæa,” a work remarkable as being the first attempt at a theory of the earth, he gave a description and drawing of this imaginary being. During more than thirty years the unicorn of Leibnitz was universally accepted throughout Germany. [71]
The Chronicle of Colmar mentions the discovery of the bones of a giant at the village of Hertin, near Basle, in 1267. [72]
Scheuchzer describes the discovery of a giant in tufa near Utikon, in the canton of Zurich.
In 1577 the skeleton of a so-called giant was found near the cloisters of Reyden, in the canton of Lucerne, under an oak-tree which was overturned by a storm. Felix Plater, Professor of Medicine at Basle, described the bones as those of a giant, and designed a human skeleton nineteen feet high to match them, of which a picture is still preserved in the Jesuits’ College at Lucerne. On it is an inscription giving a list of the bones. The people of Lucerne adopted the giant as one of the supporters of the city arms. In 1706 there only remained of these bones a portion of a scapula and a fragment of a wrist-bone, which were examined by Blumenbach and identified as bones of some form of elephant. [73]
To turn to France. In 1456, in the reign of Charles VII., some bones were found by the side of a river in the barony of Crussol, not far from Valence. These are named by several authors, and especially by Cassanion in his treatise on giants. [74] The giant to whom they belonged was supposed to have been fifteen cubits high, and to have been Briatus. The skull alone was two cubits in extent, while a shoulder-blade was six cubits across. Some time after other bones of a similar kind were found near the same place. Cassanion saw these himself, and he gives a particular description of one of the teeth, which leaves little room for doubt that it belonged to some elephant. His words are, “Miræ magnitudinis dentem multa ibidem conspeximus, longitudiuo unius pedis, pondere librarum octo; multa autem oblongior quam crassus visus est, radicesque aliquot habere quibus gingivæ inhærebat. Visa est insuper ea pars qua cibus terebatur aliquantulum concava, latitudine digitorum quatuor.” He adds that a similar tooth was preserved at Charmes, a neighbouring castle.
Shortly after a similar discovery was made of a giant eighteen feet long in the banks of a river running through St. Peirat opposite Valence. The Dauphin, afterwards Louis XI., had the bones removed to Bourges, where they long remained objects of curiosity in the Sainte Chapelle. Kircher says this giant was eighteen feet long. [75] About 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 were also examined by Cassanion, who lived near Valence. [76]
Riolan says in one of his brochures that Dauphiné was filled with such bones, and Cassanion tells us that in 1580 they showed the bones of a giant which had a few years before been found on a hill dominating the town of Tain. A third giant was discovered in 1667, in a meadow near the chateau of Molard in the diocese of Vienne, the teeth of which each weighed ten pounds, and M. de Jussieu told Cuvier he had seen hung in a church at Valence some teeth of an elephant said to be the teeth of a giant. [77]
Wood describes a third discovery of a similar kind made in 1705 near the banks of the Merden, a little river at the foot of the mountain of Crussol. This time the bones were supposed to have belonged to the giant Bucart, the tyrant of the Vivarais, who was slain by an arrow by the Count de Cabillon, his vassal. The Dominicans had a part of the shinbone, with the articulation of the knee, and his figure painted in fresco, with an inscription stating this giant to have been twenty-two and a half feet high. [78]
In 1613 some masons, digging in a field long traditionally known as the Giant’s Field at Langon, near Romans in Lower Dauphiny, discovered, as we are gravely told, sixteen feet below the surface, a brick tomb thirty feet long, twelve feet wide, and eight high, on which was engraved the inscription, “Theutobochus Rex.” When the tomb was opened, a skeleton was disclosed twenty-five and a half feet long, ten feet wide across the shoulders, and five feet deep from the breast to the back. Its teeth were the size of an ox’s foot, and its shin-bone measured four feet in length. Doctor Habicot and others urged that this was the skeleton of the famous Teutobocchus, the king of the Teutons and Cimbri, who was defeated by Marius in 150 B.C.
In 1509 there was found at Rouen, in the ditches near the Jacobins, a stone tomb containing a skeleton, whose skull held a bushel of corn, and whose shin-bone reached up to the girdles of the tallest men, it being about four feet long; consequently the body must have been seventeen or eighteen feet high. Upon the tomb was a plate of copper, engraved, “In this tomb lies the noble and puissant lord, the Chevalier Ricon de Vallemont, and his bones.” [79]
Simon Majolus, in his work entitled “Dierum Canicularium,” Colloq. II., p. 86, tells us how in 1171 a river bank breaking down in England disclosed the bones of a man who must have been fifty feet high. [80]
Ralph of Coggeshall tells us that in King Richard’s time there were found on the sea-shore, at a village called Eadulphnesse in Essex, “two teeth of a certain giant of such a huge bignesse that two hundred such teeth as men have now-a-daies might bee cut out of them.” “These saw I at Coggeshall (quoth hee), and not without wondering;” and, adds Camden, “such another giant-like thing (I wot not what) as this was in the beginning of Queene Elizabeth’s raigne digged up by R. Candish, a gentleman, neere unto this place.” [81]
Mr. Tylor tells us that certain huge jaws and teeth found in excavating on the Hoe at Plymouth were recognized as belonging to the giant Gog Magog, who in old times fought his last fight there against Corneus the eponymous hero of Cornwall. [82]
Weever, in his “Funeral Monuments,” 1631, says that in the cloister of the churchyard of St. Mary Aldermanbury, hanging fastened to a post was the shanke-bone of a man, wondrous great and large in length, twenty-eight inches and a half of assise, with the portraiture of a giant-like person, upon a table with an inscription. [83]
After the great fire in 1066, on pulling down the church of St. Mary Woolchurch, and making the site into a marketplace, was found a huge thigh-bone, which was assumed to have belonged to a woman, and which was afterwards to be seen at the King’s Head Tavern at Greenwich. [84] Collinson, in his “History of Somersetshire,” tells us how in making a well in the parish of Wedmore, in 1670, there were found at a depth of thirteen feet the remains of a giant, which Gibbons, in his discourse on Stonehenge at the end of Langtoft’s Chronicle, identified with one of the Cangick giants, a people supposed to have formerly lived there. The top of the skull was said to have been an inch thick, and one of the teeth was three inches long above the roots, three inches and a quarter round, and after the root was broken off, it weighed three ounces and a half. [85]
These stories are not only mediaeval. F. Buckland reports from Bartlett that an Irish labourer once told him he had discovered the skeleton of a giant in an Irish bog. He described it as placed on its back; the back-bone, the legs, and arms were, he stated, quite perfect, and in his opinion these bones must have been the remains of a person not less than seventeen feet high. [86]
Spanish history, says Figuier, preserves many stories of giants. The pretended tooth of St. Christopher shown at Valencia, 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. [87]
In Italy the stories of the discovery of giants are very numerous. In the reign of the Emperor Henry III., i.e. about the middle of the 11th century, we read that a peasant, when digging near Rome, found a tomb containing a skeleton of a giant. This exceeded the walls of the city in height. The tomb bore an inscription, and the skeleton was held to be that of Pallas, son of Evander, who was killed by Turnus. [88]
In 1342 some peasants, digging the foundations of a house at Trapani in Sicily, broke into a cavern in which they found a seated figure of a gigantic size. They were much frightened, and reported what they had found in the city. The citizens went out to explore, and 300 of them entered the cavern, and found that the giant was not living. He was sitting in a chair, and held in his left hand a staff exceeding a ship’s mast in size, and loaded with 1500 pounds of lead. The figure crumbled into dust on being touched, except three teeth weighing a hundred ounces each. These were suspended in a neighbouring church dedicated to the Annunciation of the Virgin. There was also a piece of the skull which held several bushels of corn, and a thigh-bone. The giant was calculated to be 200 cubits high. Some deemed it to be the skeleton of Erix, son of Brutus and Venus, killed by Heracles, and buried in that mountain; others thought it belonged to Entellus, who had slain a bull at the funeral games held by Æneas after the death of his father Anchises. Others again deemed him to be one of the Cyclops, and more definitely Polyphemus. [89] Kircher reports these facts on the authority of Boccatius in his “Deorum Genealogia,” but argues that the whole account is very much exaggerated, and goes on to say that in 1637 he himself visited Trapani, and sought out the cavern where the giant was reported to have been found, and says it was not more than thirty feet high. [90]
These remains are very common in Sicily, and it is curious to find them referred to in Don Quixote. The barber having asked Don Quixote how big the giant Morgante might have been, said, “Moreover in the island of Sicily there have been found long bones and shoulder-bones so large, that their size manifests their owners to have been giants, and as big as great towers, for this truth geometry sets beyond doubt.” [91]
Fazelus reports how in 1516 a body was found in a field called Gibilo near Mazareno in Sicily, which was twenty cubits high, and the head of which was the size of a hogshead, and each of the teeth weighed five ounces. He also says that at Melilli, between Leontium and Syracuse, there were a great number of sepulchres and gigantic skeletons, and many more in an immense cavern near Hicara. In 1538 a Genoese noble man, searching for antiquities, found near Syracuse a skeleton twenty cubits high, which fell to dust, except the skull, some ribs, part of the thigh-bone, and some teeth, which he took away, and gave to the magistrate of the place. Another skeleton, eighteen cubits long, was found by Paulus Leontinus while digging for nitre near Palermo. It all decayed away, however, except the jaw and some molar teeth, which we are told, were whitish, decayed, and rubbed. They weighed about four ounces each. Fazelus tells us two of them were given to him by Simeone Piglione.
In 1550 some workmen, repairing a tomb at Culatrari near Entella, found a tomb containing a skeleton twenty-two cubits high, which they set up in sport, and then threw stones at until it was destroyed, the teeth alone remaining. [92]
Mongitore and Valguarnera, says Cuvier, report similar stories to these of Fazelus. Targioni quotes a letter written in 1589 by a person named Folchi, in which is a description of the tooth of a giant found with some fossil shells near Syracuse. [93]
Jerome Magius speaks of a body five cubits long dug up near Reggio in making a cistern. [94]
Cuvier tells us of the skeleton of a giant found near Consentina in Calabria, and of which a description was sent to him by Father Luca Mandellus, of the Augustinian order, in a letter which he prints. In this he says the skeleton was found in a tomb in a garden near the church of St. Peter. This tomb was found under the ground, and contained bones of such a length and size that they could only have belonged to a giant. Digging in another place, for there were several chambers connected together, he says, “Nil præter hujusmodi ossa, tibias, id est crura, brachia atque costas ejusdem molis eruimus. Tandem quippiam rotundum lanci aromatariorum prægrandi non absimile conspicatus, idque totis viribus bipalio perfringere conatus, summam calvariæ partem ejusdem cadaveris esse animadverti. Quamobrem in gigantis sepulchrum nos incidisse edocti, repositis ibidem ossibus, regestasque terra solum æquantes fatigati discessimus.” The good father proceeded to inquire whose the bones were, and satisfied himself they belonged to a certain Marducchus, known as the Salernitan giant, who, when Salerno was besieged by the Emperor Henry VI., fought a single combat with Johannes Kala, and having been killed, was there buried. [95]
In the “Journal Littéraire” of the Abbé Nazari and Thomas Cornelio, we read that at Tiriolo, a castle of Upper Calabria, some labourers discovered in a garden an entire skeleton, measuring eighteen Roman feet in length. The head was two feet and a half long; each molar weighed about an ounce and one-third, and each of the other teeth weighed upwards of three-quarters of an ounce. The smallness of the teeth makes it probable the animal was a rhinoceros. [96]
The “Annual Register” for 1765 tells us that not far from Cincona was to be seen an ancient temple called the Great Church, fifteen paces from which was a large oak, commonly called the Giant’s Oak. In digging there lately about this tree, an entire giant’s skeleton of a prodigious size was found. It measured ten Roman palms in length, and its teeth were exactly like those of a large horse. Near this skeleton were found eleven other skeletons, all nearly of the same size. [97]
An Italian journal mentions that in July, 1812, the skeleton of a man ten feet three inches high was dug up in the valley of Mazara in Sicily, where human skeletons of gigantic size had been theretofore found. [98]
The list of giants here given might no doubt be greatly enlarged. It will suffice, however, to show how very widely distributed the finds of immense bones have been in Europe and its borders in early times, and is a fitting introduction to a survey of the gradually increasing knowledge by which the true character of these remains was eventually determined.
NOTES
[1] Bull. St. Pet. Acad. x. 258.
[2] Id., note 2.
[3] Pallas, Nov. Com. Pet. xiii. 439, note 9.
[4] Bull. St. Pet. Arad. x. 258.
[5] Strah., Eng. Tr., 413.
[6] Avril’s Travels, Eng. Tr., 175—177.
[7[ Op. cit., ed. 1705, 742.
[8] D’Ohsson, Voyage d’Abul Cassim, 80.
[9] Op. cit., 125 and 126.
[10] Olfers, Abhand. der Königl. Acad. der Wiss. zu Berlin, 1839, pp. 62 and 63.
[11] Ermau’s Travels, i. 61.
[12] Id. ii. 87—89.
[13] Id. 282.
[14] Bull. St. Peters. Acad. i. 2ol-5.
[15] Magazin für die Literatur des Auslandes, 1836, pp. 421, 422, noie.
[16] Murchison, Russia and the Ural Mountains, ii. 401.
[17] Herodotus, iv. 13 and 16.
[18] Id. iii 116.
[19] Æschylus, Prometheus 804—806.
[20] Op. cit., I. xxiv.
[21] Ctesias, ed. Didot, 95 and 96.
[22] Polyhist. Xv. 22.
[23] De IVe. Honor. Consul., 31 and 32. Epist. ad Serenam, 7 and 8.
[24] Servius, Scholia to Virgil, Bucolics viii. 27.
[25] Sec sub voce Taskina.
[26] Excerpta in Prisc. Hist. ed. Bonn, 158.
[27] Tylor, Early Hist. of Mankind, 318.
[28] Op. cit., iv. 152.
[29] Op. cit., iv. 79.
[30] Poet. Com. Frag. ed. Didot, 653.
[31] Wilkinson’s Egyptians, ed. Birch, ii. 230, and iii. 312.
[32] Goettling, Hesiodi Fragmenta, 123.
[33] Op. cit,, 365, &c.
[34] Cuvier, Oss. Foss. iv. 293.
[35] Id., 340.
[36] Olfers, op. cit., 70—79.
[37] Tylor, Early History of Mankind, 323.
[38] Pal. Menu. 1, page 376.
[39] Id. 312.
[40] Pliny, Natural History, vii. 16.
[41] Id., ix. 4; v. 14, note.
[42] Plutarch, Sertorius.
[43] Op. cit., xvii. ch. iii. 8.
[44] Id., ch. xi.
[45] Id. xii.
[46] Id. xiv.
[47] Id. xv.
[48] Id. xvi.
[49] Id. xvii.
[50] Id. xviii.
[51] Id. xix.
[52] Op. cit., 288, &c.
[53] Op. cit., Book i. ch. xxxv.
[54] Id.
[55] Op. cit., Book viii. ch. xxix.
[56] Cuvier, i. 99.
[57] De Civ. Dei, Lib. xv. cap. lx.
[58] Op. cit., 206.
[59] Phil. Trans. Ep. vi. 212.
[60] Quatremere, Hist, des Mongols, 218, note.
[61] Howorth, History of the Mongols, ii. 118.
[62] Phil. Trans, vi. 216.
[63] Wood, Giants and Dwarfs, 27, 28.
[64] Cuvier, Oss. Foss., 98, 99.
[65] Id.
[66] iv. 47, 48.
[67] Sloane, Phil. Trans, vi. 216.
[68] Wood, Giants and Dwarfs, 28.
[69] Cuvier, i. 139.
[70] See Bock’s Natural History of Prussia, ii. 364; Cuvier, loc. cit.
[71] Figuier, The World before the Deluge, 338.
[72] Cuvier, i. 112.
[73] Cuvier, i. 113.
[74] Id. 101.
[75] Kircher, op. cit, ii. 64.; Wood’s Giants, 129.; World before the Deluge, 337, 338.
[76] Cuvier, i. 101.
[77] Id. 104.
[78] Op. cit., 36.
[79] Wood, op. cit., 29.
[80] Phil. Trans, vi. 212.
[81] Camden’s Britannia, ed. 1637, 45.
[82] Primitive Culture, 350.
[83] Wood, op. cit., 32.
[84] Plot’s Oxfordshire, 136.
[86] Wood, op. cit., 31.
[86] Cur. of Nat. Hist. 3rd Ser. ii. 27, 28.
[87] Op. cit., 337.
[88] Kircher, Mundus Subterraneus, ii. 55, 56.
[89] Id., 54, 55.
[90] Id., 58.
[91] Tylor, Early Hist. of Mankind, 322.
[92] Kircher, op. cit., ii. 59.; Wood, 29, 30; Figuier, 339.
[93] Cuvier, i. 98.
[94] Id., 96.
[95] Kircher, Mundus Subterraneus, ii. 53, 54.
[96] Cuvier, i. 97; Wood, 37.
[97] Wood, 37, 38.
[98] Id., 39.
[2] Id., note 2.
[3] Pallas, Nov. Com. Pet. xiii. 439, note 9.
[4] Bull. St. Pet. Arad. x. 258.
[5] Strah., Eng. Tr., 413.
[6] Avril’s Travels, Eng. Tr., 175—177.
[7[ Op. cit., ed. 1705, 742.
[8] D’Ohsson, Voyage d’Abul Cassim, 80.
[9] Op. cit., 125 and 126.
[10] Olfers, Abhand. der Königl. Acad. der Wiss. zu Berlin, 1839, pp. 62 and 63.
[11] Ermau’s Travels, i. 61.
[12] Id. ii. 87—89.
[13] Id. 282.
[14] Bull. St. Peters. Acad. i. 2ol-5.
[15] Magazin für die Literatur des Auslandes, 1836, pp. 421, 422, noie.
[16] Murchison, Russia and the Ural Mountains, ii. 401.
[17] Herodotus, iv. 13 and 16.
[18] Id. iii 116.
[19] Æschylus, Prometheus 804—806.
[20] Op. cit., I. xxiv.
[21] Ctesias, ed. Didot, 95 and 96.
[22] Polyhist. Xv. 22.
[23] De IVe. Honor. Consul., 31 and 32. Epist. ad Serenam, 7 and 8.
[24] Servius, Scholia to Virgil, Bucolics viii. 27.
[25] Sec sub voce Taskina.
[26] Excerpta in Prisc. Hist. ed. Bonn, 158.
[27] Tylor, Early Hist. of Mankind, 318.
[28] Op. cit., iv. 152.
[29] Op. cit., iv. 79.
[30] Poet. Com. Frag. ed. Didot, 653.
[31] Wilkinson’s Egyptians, ed. Birch, ii. 230, and iii. 312.
[32] Goettling, Hesiodi Fragmenta, 123.
[33] Op. cit,, 365, &c.
[34] Cuvier, Oss. Foss. iv. 293.
[35] Id., 340.
[36] Olfers, op. cit., 70—79.
[37] Tylor, Early History of Mankind, 323.
[38] Pal. Menu. 1, page 376.
[39] Id. 312.
[40] Pliny, Natural History, vii. 16.
[41] Id., ix. 4; v. 14, note.
[42] Plutarch, Sertorius.
[43] Op. cit., xvii. ch. iii. 8.
[44] Id., ch. xi.
[45] Id. xii.
[46] Id. xiv.
[47] Id. xv.
[48] Id. xvi.
[49] Id. xvii.
[50] Id. xviii.
[51] Id. xix.
[52] Op. cit., 288, &c.
[53] Op. cit., Book i. ch. xxxv.
[54] Id.
[55] Op. cit., Book viii. ch. xxix.
[56] Cuvier, i. 99.
[57] De Civ. Dei, Lib. xv. cap. lx.
[58] Op. cit., 206.
[59] Phil. Trans. Ep. vi. 212.
[60] Quatremere, Hist, des Mongols, 218, note.
[61] Howorth, History of the Mongols, ii. 118.
[62] Phil. Trans, vi. 216.
[63] Wood, Giants and Dwarfs, 27, 28.
[64] Cuvier, Oss. Foss., 98, 99.
[65] Id.
[66] iv. 47, 48.
[67] Sloane, Phil. Trans, vi. 216.
[68] Wood, Giants and Dwarfs, 28.
[69] Cuvier, i. 139.
[70] See Bock’s Natural History of Prussia, ii. 364; Cuvier, loc. cit.
[71] Figuier, The World before the Deluge, 338.
[72] Cuvier, i. 112.
[73] Cuvier, i. 113.
[74] Id. 101.
[75] Kircher, op. cit, ii. 64.; Wood’s Giants, 129.; World before the Deluge, 337, 338.
[76] Cuvier, i. 101.
[77] Id. 104.
[78] Op. cit., 36.
[79] Wood, op. cit., 29.
[80] Phil. Trans, vi. 212.
[81] Camden’s Britannia, ed. 1637, 45.
[82] Primitive Culture, 350.
[83] Wood, op. cit., 32.
[84] Plot’s Oxfordshire, 136.
[86] Wood, op. cit., 31.
[86] Cur. of Nat. Hist. 3rd Ser. ii. 27, 28.
[87] Op. cit., 337.
[88] Kircher, Mundus Subterraneus, ii. 55, 56.
[89] Id., 54, 55.
[90] Id., 58.
[91] Tylor, Early Hist. of Mankind, 322.
[92] Kircher, op. cit., ii. 59.; Wood, 29, 30; Figuier, 339.
[93] Cuvier, i. 98.
[94] Id., 96.
[95] Kircher, Mundus Subterraneus, ii. 53, 54.
[96] Cuvier, i. 97; Wood, 37.
[97] Wood, 37, 38.
[98] Id., 39.
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Source: Henry H. Howorth, The Mammoth and the Flood: An Attempt to Confront the Theory of Uniformity with the Facts of Recent Geology (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1887), 1-27.
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