10 
those on the table before you. But in those days when there were 
no learned Societies, the love of the marvellous prevailed over all 
other considerations, and scientific accuracy was of secondary im- 
portance, And so these remains were always referred to mythical 
heroes, giants, or dragons. Even these monstrous teeth were 
believed to be those of men. Measuring a huge leg bone, or: 
shoulder blade, they calculated by medieval methods of geometry 
and arithmetic, the stature of the giant to whom it had once 
belonged ; hence we hear of the skeleton of Orestes, 13ft. long, dis- 
covered in Greece; of the great giant of Lucerne, 19ft. high, whose 
figure still appears in the arms of that city; and of another in. 
Crete forty-six cubits in stature. St. Augustine himself states that 
he had seen the molar tooth of a man, which would have furnished 
the substance of a hundred teeth of men of his own day. More 
than once such teeth have been enshrined in churches as relics of | 
saints, and mammoth bones have been reverently carried in pro- 
cessions. Time would fail us to notice at length the curious tales. 
about these remains. 
In our own country, and in our own immediate locality, one may 
almost say the bones and teeth of the Mammoth are common; we 
are constantly finding them in brickfields and railway cuttings. 
On the Continent they are even more plentiful; and when at last 
men could not avoid the conclusion that they really did belong to: 
elephants, they exercised their ingenuity in many directions in 
endeavouring to account for their presence. Some said they were 
antediluvian, which they certainly were; others explained their 
occurrence by the numbers of elephants brought by the Cartha- 
ginian armies in their invasions of the Roman Empire. 
The grand hunting ground for the fossil ivory derived from these. 
creatures, is, as already stated, beyond all doubt in Siberia, whence 
tons of it are exported in regular and systematic trade every year. 
There is scarcely a river or brook from the Urals to Behring Strait, 
which does not now and again yield its tribute of bones. When 
the thaw sets in, in the late spring, and the river banks give way 
under the pressure of rushing waters, then is the time for the ivory 
hunter. Tusks and bones are seen projecting from the steep sides, 
and he seldom fails to make a good thing of them. But he does 
not secure them all. Enormous quantities are swept down by the 
streams, and carried out to sea; these are washed up on the low 
shores of the islands, which are visited by boats in the Summer, 
and sledges in the Winter, and the cargoes carried away for export. 
One place called the Island of Bones has supplied China for 500 
years, and the trade is brisk still Now these traders could hardly 
have carried on this lucrative business for centuries without endea- 
youring now and again to satisfy the ever-questioning spirit of man, 
and asking Whence? and How? In the absence of definite infor- 
