THE MAMMOTH. 



197 



being reluctant to abandon their giant, have, since the sixteenth 

 century, made him the supporter of their city arms. 



The Church of St. Christopher, at Valence, possessed an 

 elephant's tooth, which was shown as the tooth of St. Christopher. 

 As this relic was " bigger than a man's fist," it is difficult to 

 picture what idea the people entertained of their saint ! 



In 1564 two peasants observed on the banks of the Rhone, 

 along a slope, some great bones sticking out of the ground. 

 These they carried to the neighbouring village, where they were 

 examined by Cassanion, who lived at Valence, and was the author 

 of a treatise on giants {De Gigantibus). Cuvier concluded from 

 this writer's description of the tooth that it belonged to an 

 elephant. 



Otto de Guericke, famous as the inventor of the air-pump, in 

 1663 witnessed the discovery of a fossil elephant, with its tusks 

 preserved. These he mistook for horns ; so did even the 

 illustrious Leibnitz, who created out of his own imagination a 

 strange animal, with a great horn in the middle of its forehead, 

 as the creature to which these remains belonged ! One is re- 

 minded of Bret Harte's amusing jeu d'esprif, The Society upon the 

 Stanislaus — 



"Then Brown he read a paper, and he reconstructed there, 

 From those same bones, an animal that was extremely rare ; " 



and how the members of this learned society came to blows over 

 their fossil bones, and hurled them at one another — " till the skull 

 of an old mammoth caved the head of Thomson in." But in this 

 case, the " animal that was extremely rare " was believed in for 

 a long time, and Leibnitz's "fossil unicorn" was universally 

 accepted throughout Germany for more than thirty years. At 

 last, however, a complete skeleton of a Mammoth was discovered, 

 and recognised as belonging to an elephant ; but the unicorn was 

 not given up without a keen controversy.^ 



• The writer is indebted for much of the information here given with 

 regard to the discoveries of Mammoth bones, and legends founded thereon, to 

 M, Figuier's World before the Deluge. 



