310 Memoir upon living and fossil Elephants. 
tain fossil elephants’ bones are, the sea of Aral and the 
shores of the Jaxartes. Daubenton mentions a petrified 
fragment of a grinder from the shores of this lake; and 
Pallas asserts that the people of the country bring to market 
ivory from the neighbourhood of this river. 
In general it may be remarked, what is very singular, 
that none of these bones are dug up in such climates as we 
know to be inhabited by elephants at the present time, while 
they are so common in latitudes where they could not exist 
at present, 
Have none of them been ever buried in the latter places ? 
Has heat decomposed them? or, when they have been dis- 
covered, have they been neglected, from being ascribed to 
the animals of the country, aud nothing extraordinary ob- 
served about them? Naturalists who intend visiting the 
torrid zone, have a very important subject of inquiry before 
them. 
It would seem, at least, that fossil hones have been seen 
in Barbary, where there are no elephants of any kind at the 
present day. 
Without mentioning the giant’s.tooth seen by saint An- 
thony upon the shores of Utica, and which was as large as a 
hundred of the human teeth of the present day, the skele- 
ton of the giant dug up by some Spanish slaves near Tunis,° 
in 1559, must have been that of an elephant, more particu- 
larly as a second skeleton was dug up at the same place in 
1630, which was certainly that of an elephant, as was ascer- 
tained by Peyresc *, 
In order to complete the history of fossil elephants, it is 
necessary io inquire if they are to be found in America, a 
country where no living ones have been discovered since it 
was known to the Europeans, and where these animals 
surely could not have been destroyed by the weak and small 
population which occupied that continent previous -to its 
discovery by the Europeans. 
Buffon has already advanced the doctrine of the existence 
of these bones in South America, aud, as he asserts, in that 
* Gassendi’s Life of Peyresc. 
part 
