THE MAMMOTH. 51 



and so are preserved from putrefaction till they thaw, and 

 come to light, which is no very unreasonable conjecture, 

 though it is not absolutely necessary that this climate 

 should have been warmer before the Flood, since the car- 

 cases of the drowned elephants were very likely to float 

 from other places several hundred miles distant to this 

 country in the great deluge which covered the surface 

 of the whole earth." 



A veritable cemetery of elephants' bones was discovered, 

 in 1700, by a soldier of Wurtemberg, in which were not 

 less than sixty tusks in the argillaceous soil near the city 

 of Canstadt. The bones which were entire were preserved, 

 but the fragment-s were given to the court physician, by 

 whom they were used to combat fever and colic. 



About the year 1772, Pallas traveled through Siberia and 

 described the bones of the mammoth as occurring in a very 

 fresh state throughout all the Lowland of Siberia. He 

 found their bones imbedded with marine remains and fossil 

 wood or lignite, such as, he says, might have been derived 

 from carbonized peat. 



The Church at Valence, Spain, possessed the molar 

 tooth of an elephant which was ascribed to St. Christo- 

 pher, who, by the way, only existed in legendary tales ; 

 and in 1789 an elephant's femur was carried through the 

 streets in public procession to procure rain, by the canons 

 of St. Vincent, who pretended it was the arm of a Saint. 



During the eighteenth century the discoveries were very 

 numerous, and the erudition of that time easily unraveled 

 the mystery. But as science has been forced to contest 

 its way step by step, so even then a check to her progress 

 w^as attemped. Some wiseacre declared that the bones 

 found in France and Italy, were the remains of the ele- 

 phants which Hannibal had brought from Carthage in his 

 expedition against Rome. Many thought this view was 

 very plausible, from the fact that these bones were numer- 



