224 ON THE FOSSIL BONES OF PACHYDERMATOUS QUADRUPED?. 



sufficient to show that they have been met with at every period and 

 in every country. 



We find traces of them from the remotest antiquity. Theophrastus 

 mentioned them in a work, which has not come down to our times ; 

 but Pliny has preserved his testimony. " Theophrastus relates that fossil 

 ivory of a white and black colour was found, that bones protruded 

 from the earth, and that stones impregnated with bones were dis- 

 covered." — Lib. xxxvi. cap. xviii. 



As certain bones of the elephant bear a much stronger resemblance 

 to those of man, than the bones of more ordinary animals, even the 

 most enlightened anatomists have not unfrequently mistaken them for 

 human bones, and this has most probabty given rise to all those pre- 

 tended discoveries of the tombs of giants, so frequently mentioned 

 by the writers of antiquity and the middle ages, We need only except 

 the largest of all, which are sometimes represented as being eight or ten 

 degrees larger than those of the largest elephants, and which we 

 might feel inclined to refer to the cetacea, if we could depend on 

 the accuracy of the measurements transmitted to us. 



Even when more rational ideas had dispelled those chimeras, they 

 must still cling to the opinion, that the elephants whose bones had 

 been discovered had been brought to the place by men. As long as 

 these discoveries were limited to Italy and the countries much fre- 

 quented by the Macedonians, the Carthaginians, and the Romans, 

 they fancied they found a sufficient explanation for them in the prodi- 

 gious number of elephants possessed by those people. 



Certain it is, that the first Europeans who became possessed of ele- 

 phants (Alexander and the Macedonians after the defeat of Porus) *, 

 brought home with them a sufficient number to enable Aristotle to give 

 an excellent account of them. That great naturalist was better ac- 

 quainted than Buffon with the manner in which the elephant copulates 

 and suckles, as well as with almost all the other details of its habits, 

 and every particular he relates has been confirmed by observations re- 

 cently made in India. 



After the death of Alexander, Antigonus was in possession of the 

 greatest number of elephants t- 



The Seleucidse always maintained a number of elephants, especially 

 after the period when Seleucus Nicator received fifty of them from 

 Sandrocottus in exchange for an entire canton on the banks of the 

 Indus J. Seleucus was the better qualified to appreciate the import- 

 ance of those animals, from his having been commander in-chief of 

 those of Alexander. 



Plutarch assures us that this prince and his allies had four hundred 

 at the battle of Issus, which they gained against Antigonus, 301 years 

 before Christ § . 



Antiochus Soter his son, employed twelve with great success against 

 theGalatse, and we may observe that Antiochus the Great ranged two 

 hundred in a line at the battle of Raphise, against Ptolemy Philopator, 

 who had only sixty-three ||, in the 535th year of the Roman era, and 



* Pausanias, Attic, lib. i, edit. Hanov. p. 21. f Idem, ibid. 



+ Strabo, lib. xv, p. 124. § Plut. in Demetr. 



[| Polybius, lib. v, cap. lxxix. 



