OK THE FOSSIL BONES OF THE ELEPHANT OF THE RUSSIANS. 243 



Habicot very properly remarks that the first fragment of the jaw 

 contained two molar teeth, and the cavities for two others ; but Riokm 

 affirms that the teeth were detached. 



This description is so obscure, that were it not for the other bones, 

 we should be at a loss to know to what we should refer it. 



2nd. Two vertebra, one of which was three fingers in thickness, 

 and admitted a man's fist into its medullary canal ; the transverse 

 apophyses . were perforated at their bases : it was undoubtedly a 

 cervical, and the delicacy of its form proves at once that it be- 

 longed to an elephant. The other was much larger, but had lost its 

 apophysis. 



3rd. A fragment from the middle of one side, six inches in length, 

 four in breadth, and two in thickness. 



4th. A fragment of the shoulder blade, the articulating surface of 

 which was twelve inches long and eight broad. 



5th. A shoulder joint as large as the head of a middle sized man, 

 and the fissure of which would give admittance to the knob of an ink- 

 stand. 



6th. A thigh bone five feet long, three feet in circumference above, 

 two at the prominences of the articulations, and one-and-a-half in the 

 centre : it wanted the trocanters. The neck had neither the length 

 nor the obliquity of that of a man. 



7th. A tibia nearly four feet in length, and more than two in cir- 

 cumference at its base. 



8th. An astragalus differing from that of animals, (i. e. domestic 

 animals) but which had not the scaphoid, apophysis as large as that of 

 a man. 



9th. Lastly, a calcaneum, having at its base articulating surfaces for 

 the scaphoid and cuboid bones, but the posterior apophysis or tuberosity 

 of which w r as not a3 prominent as that of a man. This latter extre- 

 mity most unquestionably belonged to an elephant ; there is no other 

 animal the astragalus of which so far resembles that of a man, as to be 

 mistaken even by the most inexperienced observer*. 



Riolan states in one of his pamphlets that Dauphine abounds in 

 those bones. Indeed as early as 1580, Cassanio testifies that they ex- 

 hibited the bones of giants, which had been exhumed several years pre- 

 viously, upon the hill that overlooks the hamlet of Tainf. 



Another supposed giant was discovered in 1667, in a meadow near 

 the castle of Molard, in the diocese of VienneJ:. The teeth weighed 

 ten pounds each. M. de Jussieu has told me that a long time since 

 he saw some bones of elephants hanging in one of the churches of 

 Valence, and that they were looked upon as those of a giant. Sloan e 

 relates that in his time a French merchant had imported some from 

 the same province into England. 



* All doubts on this subject have been recently removed, by the discovery of the 

 bones which the surgeon had given out to be those of Teutobochus, in the house in 

 •which Mazurier died, at Bourdeaux. They have been ascertained to be the bones, 

 not of an elephant, but of a mastodonte, an animal which differs from the elephant 

 merely in the structure of its teeth. (Laur.) 



t Cassanio, de Gigantibus, p. 64. 



+ Dora. Calmet. Diet, de la Bible, ii, p. 16U 



