FOSSIL MAMMALIA. 47 



the sixteenth century. But he, as was usual in his time, attri- 

 buted those remains to the expeditions of the Romans. In the 

 environs of Strasburgh many bones have been found, and they 

 are abundantly scattered through the vallies of Switzerland. 

 The history of a giant disinterred near Lucerne in 1577, made 

 almost as much noise as a similar discovery in France, which 

 was considered to be that of the body of Teutobocchus, king 

 of the Cimbri. Felix Plater, a celebrated professor of me- 

 dicine, made a drawing of a human skeleton, of the supposed 

 height of the being to whom the fossil remains belonged, 

 which was only nineteen feet. The Lucernese have made this 

 pretended giant the supporter of the arms of the city. 



These remains are very abundant throughout all Alsace, 

 along the entire courses of the Rhine and the Meuse, and na- 

 turally to be expected in the beds of alluvion collected in the 

 mouths of those rivers. We, therefore, find that Holland 

 abounds in those remains. 



But Germany is the country beyond all others in which the 

 greatest quantity of fossil elephantine bones have been dis- 

 covered. This, as the Baron Cuvier remarks, is not perhaps 

 because that country actually contains more of these remains, 

 but because there is scarcely a district in the empire without 

 some man of intelligence and education, capable of scientific 

 researches. As early as 1784, Merk reckoned no less than 

 eighty different places, in which those fossils were found. M. 

 de Zach increased the number to more than one hundred, and 

 Blumenbach has doubled it. Were we to enter even into a su- 

 perficial description of those discoveries in Germany, we might 

 write a volume. Remains have been found in the basins of 

 the Danube, the Elbe, and the Weser ; in every part, in short, 

 of this immense empire, in regions where the Roman armies 

 never penetrated, and where, consequently, the presence of 

 such remains cannot be attributed to Roman importation. In. 

 deed, when we consider the immense abundance of those fossils, 

 the situations in which they are generally found, the other ani- 



