APPENDIX B. 93 



sea hath had its course. And Goropius Becanus"^ long 

 ago could not digest that conceit when he found great 

 numbers of shells upon the highest Alps. For many 

 may be brought unto places where they were not first 

 found. 



" Some bones of our whale were left in several fields 

 which when the earth hath obscured them, may deceive 

 some hereafter, that the sea hath come so high. In 

 northern nations where men live in houses of fishbones 

 and in the land of the Icthiophagi near the Red sea 

 where mortars were made of the backbones of whales, 

 doors of their jaws, and arches of their ribs, when time 

 hath covered them they might confound after discoverers. 



" For many years great doubt was made concerning 

 those large bones found in some parts of England, and 

 named Giants' bones till men [p. 195] considered they 

 might be the bones of elephants brought into this island 

 by Claudius, and perhaps also by some succeeding 

 emperors [then follow other ancient examples of the 

 finding ' elephants bones ' in various countries attributed 

 to similar modes of introduction]. But many things 

 prove obscure in subterraneous discovery 



" In some chalk pits about Norwich many stag's horns 

 are found of large beams and branches, the solid parts 

 converted into a chalky and fragile substance, the pithy 

 part sometimes hollow and full of brittle earth and clay. 

 In a churchyard of this city an oaken billet was found 

 in a coffin. About five years ago an humourous man of 

 this country after his death and according to his own 

 desire was wrap't up in a horned hide of an ox and so 



^^ This seems to refer to the "De Gigantibus eorumque reliquiis'' 

 of J. van Gorp, Jean B^can, or Joannes Goropius (as the name is 

 variously given in the "Biographie Universelle " (b. 1518, d. 1572), and 

 apparently published after the Author's death by Jean Chassanion, 8vo, 

 Basilese, 1580, and another edition in 1587. See Brit. Mus. Cat. ; but I 

 have not seen the book. 



