^ON THE FOSSIL BONES OF THE ELEPHANT. 263 



wf elephants have been found there very much calcined. Altenbourg, 

 on the Pleiss, appertains to the same bason ; some fossil ivory was 

 found there in 1740 *. Here, also, we must notice the fossil ivory found 

 near Rabschitz, on the road from Meissen to Freyberg, mentioned by 

 Fabricius, in his Annals of the Town of Meissen, dated 1566 f ; the tusk 

 extracted from a rock near Saalberg, which this same author cele- 

 brates in some wretched Latin verses \, and the bones found in the 

 vegetable earth at Erxeben near Erfurt §. 



Bohemia yields a fair proportion of the bones of elephants, according 

 to the testimony of M. John Meyer, who gives a drawing of a jaw 

 bone from among several that were found with some other bones near 

 Podiebrad in 1782; he was in possession of a piece of ivory from 

 Kosteletz on the Elbe, between Melnik and Liboch : the latter was ten 

 inches in diameter. The same author states, that, in the Imperial 

 Museum at Prague, there is preserved a tusk almost perfect, found in 

 the vicinity of Libeschiz. In addition to this, he assures us, that he 

 can speak to several other pieces ; and that the historians of Bohemia 

 mention numerous discoveries of bones of extraordinary size, made for 

 the most part when the rivers had carried away a portion of their 

 banks ||. 



It was not easy to attribute to the Romans the remains of elephants 

 found buried in the north of Germany, and as far as the banks of the 

 Elbe, whither the armies of that people never appear to have ad- 

 vanced ; but as they had discovered in Eginhart % and in the other an- 

 nalists of the times of Charlemagne, that the Caliph Haaroun Al Raschid, 

 at the request of that prince, had sent him an elephant, wbich tra- 

 velled in safety as far as Aix la Chapelle, they supposed that Charle- 

 magne might have had it led farther north, and, as long as they made 

 isolated discoveries only, they sought to account for them by this indi- 

 vidual elephant. It is needless to remark how puerile such an idea 

 looks at the present day, when they have discovered the bones of 

 elephants in Germany by the hundred. 



If we cross the German Ocean to the British isles, which, by their 

 position, were cut off from the opportunity of receiving many live 

 elephants in ancient times (although Polieenus ** indeed asserts, that 

 Csesar transported one thither), we shall find that the fossil remains are 

 there in as great abundance as on the continent. 



In the middle ages, giants had been found there ; and Simon 

 Majolus mentions one, exposed by a river in 1171 %%■ 



* Schnetter's Letter to J. J. Raab, June, 1740. 



T Bausch on Fossil Ivory, 189. 



1 Albinus Meissniche Berg-Chronik, p. 172. 



§ Walch, Knorr's Monuments, vol. ii, sect, ii, p. 162, who quotes Baumer's Trans- 

 actions of the Academy of Eufurt, vol. ii ; but I could find no allusion to the subject 

 in the Observations on Subterraneous Geography in the Transactions of the Aca- 

 demy of Erfurt of 1776, the only essay of Baumer which can come under that de- 

 signation. There are merely two plates in that volume, representing bones of the 

 rhinoceros, to which I shall refer hereafter. 



|| Memoir of a Private Society at Bohemia, vol. vi. p. 260. pi. iii. 



1f Recueil des Histor. de France, vol. v. p. 95. 



** Polinseus, book viii. c. 23. s. 5. 



5fl Dierum CanicuL Coll. iL p. 36, in Sloane, Acad, of Sciences, 1727, p. 320. 



B B 2 



