Some Cranks and their Crotchets 437 



About seventy years ago, one John Ranking 

 published in London a volume entitled " Histori- 

 cal Researches on the Conquest of Peru, Mexico, 

 Bogota, Natchez, and Talomeco, 1 in the Thirteenth 

 Century, by the Mongols, accompanied with Ele- 

 phants." It is well known that in 1281 the Mon- 

 gols, after conquering pretty much everything from 

 the Carpathian Mountains and the river Euphra- 

 tes to the Yellow Sea, invaded Japan. A typhoon 

 dispersed their fleet ; and their army of more than 

 100,000 men, cut off from its communications, was 

 completely annihilated by the Japanese. But Mr. 

 Ranking believed that this wholesale destruction 

 was a fiction of the chroniclers. He maintained 

 that most of the army escaped in a new fleet and 

 crossed the Pacific Ocean, taking with them a host 

 of elephants, with the aid of which they made 

 extensive conquests in America and founded king- 

 doms in Mexico and Peru. The widespread fossil 

 remains of the American mastodon he took to be 

 the bones of these Mongolian elephants. Now, 

 this is an extremely wild theory, unsound and un- 

 tenable in every particular, but it does not bring 

 Mr. Ranking' s book within the class of eccentric 

 literature. The author was deficient in scholar- 

 ship and in critical judgment, but he was not daft. 



1 A site not far from that of Evansville, Indiana. 



