190 Outlines of Geology, 



overwhelming current of water, traversing the globe in this direc- 

 tion ; hut these very theorists tell us of the formation of gravel ; 

 of the detrition and rounding down of the hardest substances in 

 nature, by the same torrent, and yet the organic remains we have 

 been looking at are for the most part so perfect, that they re- 

 tain all those protuberances and indentations by which the skilful 

 eye of the anatomist not only detects the part of the body to 

 which the bones belong, but discerns in the majority of cases, 

 the genus and species of the animal, by the inspection of a single 

 bone. Hence it has been inferred, but the inference, as Ave shall 

 see, is not without most w^eighty objections, that these animals 

 lived and dwelled upon the very s|X)ts in which we now find them. 

 The bones of elephants and other very large animals, some approach- 

 ing to, but others widely different from the species now in exist- 

 ence, have been met with in almost all countries where they have 

 been diligently looked for, either in caverns peculiar to certain 

 rocks, or in the alluvium of valleys, and generally, therefore, either 

 in, or not far from the beds of rivers, and in islands as well as con- 

 tinents. Marsigli, in his History of the Danube^ has described the 

 remains of elephants, supposed to be those which Trajan carried 

 with him in his expedition against the Dacians. At the beginning 

 of the last century, nearly a hundred tusks of elephants were dug 

 Bp "in an alluvial soil in Wirtemburg, some of which were upwards 

 of ten feet long, and they were accompanied by the teeth and 

 bones of several unknown animals, or extinct species. 



In Italy, the country about Verona is famed as the repository 

 of organic relics ; bones of enormous magnitude have there been 

 exhumated, and in such a perfect state, that we can scarcely sup- 

 pose them to have travelled far, much less to have been submitted 

 to the continuous operation of, or to ordinary transportation by 

 water. No wonder that the ancients thought these were the re- 

 mains of a giant race ; that Pliny talks of human skeletons, 

 twenty-four feet high ; that Kircher describes the skeleton of 

 Pallas, slain by Turnus, as higher than the walls of Rome ; and 

 that of one of the Cyclops, probably Polyphemus himself, as having 

 been somewhere about 300 or 350 feet high. The same author, 



