27 G ON THE FOSSIL BONES OF PACHYDERMATOUS QUADRUPEDS. 



It is not a little singular that these bones are never discovered 

 in those countries which are inhabited by the elephants of our day, 

 while they are so common in latitudes where those animals could 

 not exist for a moment. 



Can it be that none have been buried there, or that the heat has 

 decomposed them, or, when they have been discovered, has the cir- 

 cumstance been allowed to pass unnoticed, because as far as they were 

 referred to the animals of the country, there was nothing extraordinary 

 in the fact of their discovery ? 



May it not also be, that the mammoth being destined to be an in- 

 habitant of the north, as its thick wool and long hair evidently demon- 

 strate, it was not to be found within a certain distance of the tropics ? 

 The geologists who shall visit the torrid zone have here a line subject 

 for speculation. 



Nevertheless, we find that these fossils have been seen in Barbary, 

 where there are no elephants of any kind, although the climate seems 

 perfectly suited to their temperament, and although there were 

 numbers of them anciently, at least in Mauritania, according to the 

 testimony of all the writers of antiquity *. 



Leaving out of the question the giant's tooth seen by St. Au- 

 gustin, and by many others on the sea shore near Utica, which, 

 according to the statement of that father of the church, might have 

 made a hundred of our ordinary teeth ; and the two skeletons, the 

 one thirty-two feet six inches ; the other, thirty-four feet in length, 

 which Phlegonusof Tralles tells us, on the authority of Eumachus,were 

 discovered by the Carthaginians f ; and the supposed body of Antssus, 

 discovered near Lynx or Tingis in Mauritania, which was eighty feet 

 in length, and to which Sertorius caused a sacrifice to be offered X ; the 

 skeleton of a giant exhumed by some Spanish slaves near Tunis, in 

 1559 §, would appear to have been that of an elephant, as a second, ex- 

 humed in the same spot in 1630, was ascertained to be that of an ele- 

 phant by the celebrated Peyresc, who compared the bones with those 

 of a live animal which he happened to see in 1631. 



It was only wanting to complete the measure of singularity that the 

 fossil elephant should be found in America. To this continent no live 

 elephants have ever been transported since it has become known to 

 Europeans, and where it is impossible to imagine, that, had they pre- 

 viously existed, they could have been destroyed by the insignificant 

 and scanty population that inhabited it previous to its discovery. 



Buff on was the first to assert the existence of these bones in North 

 America, and according to his account in North America alone. Nay, 

 he went so far as to account for their destruction in that continent by 

 the impossibility which they must have experienced in attempting to 

 pass the isthmus of Panama, when the gradual increase of the cold 

 urged them to the south, as if all the lower parts of Mexico were not 



* Strabo, book xvii. Pliny, book viii, chap. xi. Elian, book x, chap, i, and book 

 xiv, c. v. 



t PhlegonusDe Mirab., cap. xviii. 



X Plutarch, Sertorius, chap, iii, and Strabo, chap, xvii, p. 829. 



§ Leroni Magius Miscellany, book i, chap, ii, p. 19. 



