GN THE FOS£IL BONKS OF THE IvLIU'HANT OF THE RUSSIANS. 249 



The great valley of the Rhine is surcharged with these bones. The 

 neighbourhood of Strasbourg has yielded them in abur.dance. 



Bascler speaks of a tusk found in the Rhine, near Nonnenweycr. A 

 fragment from the same place, three feet two inches long, is still 

 preserved by M. Spielmann, an apothecary of Strasbourg, and a molar 

 tooth, of Wittenweyer, which adjoins it, is preserved by Mr. Peterson, 

 an inhabitant of the same town *. 



Jean Herrmann, in a peculiar programme of December 15, 1785, 

 shews that the supposed bull's horn, which had hung for a series of 

 years on the walls of the cathedral of Strasbourg, and which Buffon 

 mentions as such t, is in reality an elephant's tusk, which, in all pro- 

 bability, had anciently been found in the same river. 



The neighbourhood of Bale has yielded them in similar proportions. 

 M. Adrien Camper saw a quantity of them in 1788 in the Museums 

 of that town, and amongst others, in that of M. Bernouilli+. Knorr 

 had previously given a drawing of a jaw and a bone of the metacarpus 

 kept in the Museum of M. d'Annone, professor at Bale§. 



The Chronicle of Colmar, of the year 1267, speaks of the bones of 

 giants found near Bale, at the village of Hertin ||. 



There are also several molar teeth in the public library of Bale. 

 Two of them have been engraved as the teeth of giants %. Davila 

 procured a fragment of ivory from the same place**. 



They have been found at Mutterz, a league from Bale, and at 

 Rheinfelden ff. 



Many of the valleys of Switzerland, stretching along towards the 

 valley of the Rhine, produce them in no inconsiderable quantities.- 



The history of the giant exhumed near Lucerne in 1577, vies in 

 celebrity with that of the pretended Teutobochus. These bones were 

 found beneath an oak uprooted by the wind near the Monastery of Rey- 

 den. Felix Plater, the celebrated professor of medicine at Bale, happen- 

 ing to visit Lucerne in 1584, seven years after the discovery, examined 

 these bones, and declared that they must have belonged to a man of 

 enormous stature. The Council of Lucerne having sent them to him 

 to Bale, he superintended the engraving of a human skeleton equal 

 in size to what he supposed to be that of the subject to which the 

 bones had belonged — viz. nineteen feet — and sent back this engraving, 

 with the bones, to Lucerne. The drawing is still preserved in the 

 ancient College of the Jesuits. There is an inscription on it, import- 

 ing that these bones consisted of portions of the thigh, tibia, shoulder- 

 plate, clavicle, vertebrae, sacrum, coccyx, and ribs, as well as frag- 

 ments of the skull, and an almost perfect os malse, a calcaneum, and a 



* Hammer's Letters. 



f- Supplement to Nat. History, vol. v, p. 543. 



J Anatomical Description of an Elephant, p. 28. 



§ Knorr's Monuments, vol. ii, sect. 2. tab. H, and h iii. 



|| Dom Calmet, Dictionary of the Bible, vol. ii, p. 160. 



^f M. Hammer is in possession of these engravings. 



** Davila, Cab. iii, p. 229. 



ft On the authority of Hammer's letters. See also Brucker Merckwurdigkeiten 

 der Landschaft Basel, No. xv, pi. xv. fig. 1 and 2, and Davila, p. 227. And a Selec- 

 tion of Essays on National History, by Bertrand, p. 23. 



