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’esprit, 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. 
1 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. 
