Outlines of Geology, 191 



and others of great respectability, give us the measures of other 

 colossal personages, and when we reflect, that the credulity and 

 misinterpretation that are here so glaring, are not the errors of 

 the weak and illiterate, but of men of learning, and men of talents, 

 gf the best instructed by reading, by conversation, and by travel, 

 pf any in the ages in which they lived, we cannot but be struck 

 by the diflference between the criterion of truth, as received in 

 those ages, and at the present day ; a diversity referrible to divers 

 causes, but to none more than to the progress of natural and 

 experimental science, in modem, and more particularly . in our 

 own times. 



That the animals, of whose remains we are now speaking, actu- 

 ally occupied the spots upon which they are found, and that their 

 skeletons were not transported thither by the deluge, or by any 

 post-diluvian debacle, is by some supposed to be rendered addi- 

 tionally probable, by the discovery of a rhinoceros and of an 

 elephant in the north of Siberia, with part of the flesh and skin 

 preserved. In regard to the former, Pallas observes that its foot 

 alone was coated with more hair than that usually found upon 

 the whole body of any living rhinoceros ; and hence he suggests 

 the probability of the animal having been a native of a colder 

 clime than the Torrid Zone, and it is known that the rhi- 

 noceros in the North of India has more hair than the animal 

 dwelling in the South of Africa. Again, in the year 1799, 

 there was discovered in an iceberg, on the North shore of 

 Siberia, a singular mass, which the fishermen observed for se- 

 veral winters without being able to ascertain what it was, when 

 in 1803, in consequence of the thawing of the ice, it became 

 evident that it was a large elephant-like animal, of which 

 one of the tusks was protuberant. We are indebted to Mr. Stokes 

 for an account and drawing of the skeleton of this animal * ; the 

 tusks were of extraordinary size and beauty, and as the proprietor 

 was content with the profit they afforded, he was heedless as to 

 the carcass, the greater part of which served as a repast for the 

 bears, wolves, and foxes, who seem prodigiously to have relished 

 * Vide Vol. VIII. of this Journal, page 95. 



