■260 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTONS. [aNNO 1728. 



and was found in the year 1644 at Krembs, in the lower Austria, on increasing 

 the fortifications of that place. 



The year following, when the Swedes came to besiege the town of Krembs, 

 a whole skeleton of a giant, as was pretended, was found at the top of a neigh- 

 bouring mountain, near an old Tower. The besiegers, in their intrenchments 

 there, being very much incommoded by the water that came down from the 

 mountains, dug a ditch 3 or 4 fathoms deep, to lead it another way. In digging 

 this ditch they found that skeleton, which was much admired for its unusual 

 size. Many of the bones, chiefly those of the head, fell to pieces on being 

 exposed to the air; others were broken by the carelesness of the workmen; 

 some escaped entire, and were sent to learned men in Poland and Sweden. 

 Among these was a shoulder-bone, with an acetabulum in it, large enough to 

 hold a cannon-ball. The head, with regard to its bulk, was compared to a round 

 table, and the bones of the arms, or fore-legs, as thick as a man of an ordi- 

 nary size. One of the grinders, weighing 5 pounds, was given to the Jesuits 

 at Krembs : another is figured by Happelius (in his Relationes Curiosae, torn. 4, 

 p. 47, 48,) and it appears plainly by the figure of it, that it is an elephant's 

 tooth. It weighed 4lb. 3 oz. Nuremberg weight. 



Again, in Lambecius's Bibliotheca Caesarea Vindobonensis, are two figures, 

 and the description of a very large elephant's tooth, which weighed 44lb. It 

 was sent from Constantinople to Vienna in 1678. They pretended that it was 

 found near Jerusalem, in a spacious subterranean cavern, in the grave of a 

 giant, which had the following inscription on it in the Chaldaic language and 

 characters; " Here lies the giant OG;" whence it was conjectured to have been 

 the tooth of Og, king of Basan, who was defeated by Moses, and who " only 

 remained of the remnants of giants ; whose 'oedstead was of iron, 9 cubits was 

 the length thereof, and 4 cubits the breadth of it, after the cubit of a man." 



Hieronymus Ambrosius Langenmantel, a member of the Imperial Academy 

 of Sciences, inserted into the Ephemerides of that Academy, an abstract of a 

 letter to himself, from Johannes Ciampini in Rome, concerning some very large 

 bones, viz. the shank- bone, the shoulder-bone, and 5 vertebras, one of which 

 was a vertebra of the neck, which were dug up near Vitorchiani, in the 

 bishopric of Viterbo, in the year 1687. They weighed altogether upwards of 

 180 Roman pounds; and having been compared with the other like bones in 

 several collections at Rome, particularly the Chisian, they appeared to be by 

 far the largest. Most people took them to be the bones of a giant, but Ciam- 

 pini, and some others, taking them, with more probability, for the bones of 

 an elephant, or some other large animal, and knowing that there was in the 

 Medicean collection at Florence a complete skeleton of an elephant, they pro- 



