THE LEVIATHAN. 121 



sufficient quantity, he closes the wound by rolling himself in the 

 mud. 



In compliance with the prevailing opinion, which refers this de- 

 scription to the hippopotamus, we have thought it right to exhibit 

 some of the points of resemblance which have been discovered be- 

 tween that creature and the behemoth of the book of Job. We 

 much doubt, however, the identity of the animals, and are more in- 

 clined to think, with Drs. Good and Clarke, that the sacred writer 

 refers to an animal of an extinct genus. Dr. Clarke believes it to 

 have been the mastodanton or mammoth, some part of a skeleton of 

 which he has carefully examined, and thus described in his com- 

 mentary on Gen. i. 24. The mammoth for size will answer the 

 description in verse 19 : * He is the chief of the ways of God.' 

 That to which the part of a skeleton belonged, which I examined, 

 must have been, by computation, not less than twenty-Jive feet high, 

 and sixty feet in length ! The bones of one toe I measured, and 

 found them three feet in length ! One of the very smallest grinders 

 of an animal of this extinct species, full of processes on the surface, 

 more than an inch in depth, which showed that the animal had liv- 

 ed on flesh, I have just now weighed, and found it, in its very dry 

 state, four pounds eight ounces, avoirdupoise : the same grinder of 

 an elephant I have weighed also, and find it just two pounds. The 

 mammoth, therefore, from this proportion must have been as large 

 as two elephants and a quarter. We may judge by this of its size ; 

 elephants are frequently ten and eleven feet high: this will make the 

 mammoth at least twenty-Jive or twenty-six feet high ; and as it ap- 

 pears to have been a many-toed animal, the springs which such a 

 creature could make, must have been almost incredible : nothing 

 by siciftness could have escaped its pursuit. God seems to have 

 made it as the proof of his power; and had it been prolific, and not 

 become extinct, it would have depopulated the earth. Creatures 

 of this kind must have been living in the days of Job : the behemoth 

 is referred to here, as if perfectly commonly known.' 



THE LEVIATHAN, 



THE word Leviathan occurs only in four passages of scripture, in 

 addition to that very sublime description which is furnished of the 

 creature to which the appellation is given, in the forty-first chapter 

 of the book of Job a description in the highest degree poetical, 

 and, in the minutest particular, just. There can be little doubt that 

 the same creature is elsewhere called Tan and Tannin, which 

 words are variously rendered whale, dragon, serpent, and sea-mon- 

 ster; a diversity of translation sanctioned by the original penmen, 



