ON THE FOSSIL BONES OF THE ELEPHANT OF THE RUSSIANS. 25 3 



In 1811, I took a drawing of half a pelvis, which I observed in 

 the Museum begun by king Louis Buonaparte, under the direction of 

 Mr. Reinwardt, in the town hall of Amsterdam. This fragment was 

 also thrown up at Bommelerwaerdt, by an eruption of the Meuse. 



The Moniteur, already quoted (16th of April, 1809), speaks of 

 another half of a pelvis thrown up by the Whaal, in the inunda- 

 tion which filled the dyke of Loenen, in the province of Betuwe, a 

 little above Nimeguen. 



M. Brugmans, a professor of Leyden, has given me the drawing of 

 a thigh, found in the neighbourhood of that town. 



The more elevated parts of the united provinces yield their share 

 of these fossils. 



Picaardt mentions some enormous bones of the district of Drenthe, 

 and a tusk nine feet in length, exhumed in July, 1 650, near Coevor- 

 den *. Of all European countries, Germany has unquestionably fur- 

 nished the greatest quantity of the fossil remains of elephants, not so 

 much because it really contains more than other countries, but because 

 there is scarce a district of that empire that does not possess some man 

 of learning and abilities, well qualified to investigate and to make 

 known the discoveries that may prove interesting to science. 



As early as 1784, Merk enumerated eighty places f where bones of 

 this description w ere exhumed, and more than one hundred specimens 

 of bones, the origin of which had not been ascertained. M. de Zach 

 makes the number of places amount to one hundred $-, and M. Blu- 

 menbach doubles that quantity §. 



Everybody knows the story of the elephant, discovered at Tonna, in 

 the district of Gotha, in 1696, which has been described byTentzelius 

 andHoyer ||. 



A second was exhumed in 1799, at a distance of fifty feet from the 

 place from where the other had been found ; and the celebrated astro- 

 nomer, the Baron de Zach, has given a most circumstantial account of 

 the ground, of which we shall avail ourselves in noticing the details 

 of the discovery %. A previous account had been published in Voigt's 

 Journal**. 



There are two places named Tonna (Graeffen-Tonna and Burg- 

 tonna), both situated in the recesses of the valley of the Unstrut, below 

 Langensalza, and to the right of Salza and the Unstrut. All the gorges 

 of this valley, as well as most of the low vallies of Thuringia,are formed 



* Ann. Drenth. in Verster, passage already cited. 



-f Merke, second Letter, p. 8. 



X Monthly Correspondence, January, 1800. 



§ Archeeologia telluris, p. 1 2. 



|| Letter of Tentzelius to Magliabecchium, on the ivory discovered at Tonna, Phil. 

 Transact., vol. xix No, 234, pp. 757 — 776; J. G. Hoyer, on Fossil Ivory, or the 

 Elephant's Tusk lately discovered in a sandy hill. Ephem. Nat. Cur. See also the 

 Transactions of a learned Society of Leipsick, Jan. 1697, and Valentine, Amph., 

 p. 26. 



% A notice of the skeleton of an elephant found at Burgtonna, in the corres- 

 pondence relative to the progress of geography and astronomy. A German Journal 

 of M. de Zach, Jan. 1800, art. ii, p. 21. 



** Magazine of Novelties of Natural History and Physics, by Lichtenberg and 

 Voigt, in German, vol. iii. 



