MASTODONS, MAMMOTHS AND OTHER PLEISTOCENE MAMMALS 21 



statement, " there were giants in the earth in those days," judged 

 the remains to be of antediluvial giant men. But Mather's 

 information was derived from a letter he had received from Gov- 

 ernor Joseph Dudley, dated Roxbury, July 10, 1706, and from an 

 item published July 30, 1705 in the Boston News Letter. 



B. Green, editor and printer of the Boston News Letter, gives the 

 following account : " New York, July 23. There is a prodigious 

 Tooth brought here, supposed by the shape of it to be one of the 

 far great Teeth of a man ; it weighs four pound and three quarters, 

 the top of it as sound and white as a Tooth can be, but the Root is 

 much decayed, yet one of the fangs of it holds half a pint of Liquor ; 

 it was lately dug up, a great way under ground in the side of a 

 Bank or Hill 30 or 40 Foot above it, at or near a place call'd Claver- 

 ack, about 30 miles on this side of Albany, and is looked upon here 

 as a mighty wonder, whither the Tooth be of Man or Beast : They 

 also dug up several Bones, which as they came to the Air crumbled 

 away: They say one of them which is thought to be a Thigh-bone 

 was 17 Foot long. There is since another Tooth taken up in the 

 same place, which is a Fore Tooth flat and broad, and is as broad 

 as mans Four Fingers, which I have not yet seen; but the other I 

 did see, and t'was brought here by a Gentleman of the Assembly: 

 They dug up several Trees in the same place of great bigness." 



A short extract from the above account, without reference to the 

 source, is given in Dunlap's History of the New Netherlands 

 (1840). DeKay (1842) incorrectly credited Dunlap's account to 

 the Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. of London for 1705. 



Governor Dudley's letter to Mather, which is concerned particu- 

 larly with an account of specimens found some miles south of Al- 

 bany, states concerning the teeth from Claverack : " . . . one of 

 the same growth, but not of equal weight, was last year presented 

 to my Lord Cornbury, and one of the same figures exactly was 

 shown at Hartford of near a pound weight more than this." 



As an interesting commentary on the thought and learning of the 

 time in matters pertaining to natural science, Cotton Mather's com- 

 munication taken from the Transactions of the Royal Society, is 

 quoted in full : " The first letter directed to Doctor Woodward, is 

 dated at Boston, in New England, Nov. 17, 1712. In this the 

 Writer gives an Account of a large Work in Manuscript, in two 

 Volumes in Folio, but does not name the Author. This, according 

 to the account of it, is a large Commentary upon some Passages in 

 the Bible interspers'd with large Philosophical Remarks taken out 



