THE MAMMOTH. 49 



In 1456, in France, bones of pretended giants were no- 

 ticed in the bed of the Rhone. Soon after other discov- 

 eries were made near Saint-Peirat, opposite Valence, which 

 were cared for by the Dauphin, afterwards Louis XI, and 

 sent to Bourges, where they long remained objects of curi- 

 osity in the interior of the Saint-Chapelle. In the same 

 neighborhood, in 1564, two peasants noticed, on the banks 

 of the Rhone, some great bones sticking out of the ground. 

 Cassanion pronounced them giants' bones, and this dis- 

 covery doubtless caused him to write his treatise entitled 

 '•De Gigantibus." 



In the Canton of Lucerne, Switzerland, in the year 1577, 

 a storm uprooted an oak near the cloisters of Reyden, ex- 

 posing some large bones. These bones were examined by 

 Felix Platen, then a celebrated physician and professor at 

 Basle, who declared them to be the remains of a giant 

 nineteen feet in height. On account of the conclusions 

 of Platen the inhabitants of Lucerne adopted the image 

 of the fabulous giant as the supporter of the city arms. 

 In 1706 only two fragments of the skeleton remained, 

 which, on being examined, by Blumenbach, were recog- 

 nized as belonging to the elephant. 



Otto de Guericke, a celebrated physicist and inventor 

 of the air pump, in 1663, witnessed the discovery of the 

 bones of the elephant, along with its enormous tusks, 

 buried in the shelly-limestone, Germany. The tusks were 

 taken for horns, and out of the remains Leibnitz construct- 

 ed a strange animal, carrying a horn in the middle of its 

 forehead, and in each jaw a dozen molar-teeth a foot long, 

 and calling the creature the fossil unicorn. In his " Pro- 

 togaea " he gave a description and a drawing of the imagin- 

 ary animal. For more than thirty years the unicorn 

 of Leibnitz was universally accepted throughout Germany, 

 and was only dissipated by the discovery of an entire skel- 

 eton of the mammoth in the valley of the L^nstrut, 



