NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 101 



over the Ohio, over the Wabash, the Illinois, and finally over the great lakes, where he 

 is living at this day." Jefferson's Notes on Virginia. 



In the year 1748, M. Fabri, who had made great excursions into the northern parts of 

 Louisiana and the southern regions of Canada, informed BufFon that he had seen heads and 

 skeletons of an enormous quadruped, called by the savages the father of oxen ; and that 

 the thigh bones of these animals were from five to six feet in length." BufforCs Natural 

 History, translated by Smellie, vol. 9. 



In Siberia a similar animal was supposed to exist under ground, and many fables were 

 related respecting it under the Russian name of mammoth. Notwithstanding these tradi- 

 tions and reports, the attention of the philosophers of Europe was not fully drawn to this 

 subject until 1 765, when Mr. George Croghan saw, in the vicinity of a large salt marsh, on 

 the country bordering on the Ohio, immense bones and teeth, and he sent some of them to 

 England, where they immediately became the subject of speculation and discussion ; 

 before this similar bones were discovered in the Russian dominions. Dr. Hunter, a cele- 

 brated anatomist, from an examination of the teeth, pronounced them to belong to a car- 

 nivorous non-descript animal. Daubenton declared, at one time, that this animal was an 

 elephant, and at another time thought that the teeth were those of an hippopotamus, and 

 conceived that the animal partook of both those species, and was a real mule. Muller 

 supposed that they belonged to certain unknown quadrupeds, denominated mammouts, or 

 mammoths, from the Russian name, supposed to have been derived from the Hebrew behe- 

 moth. Buftbn was of opinion that, independently of the elephant and hippopotamus, whose 

 relicks are equally found in the two continents, another animal, common to both, has 

 formerly existed, the size of which has greatly exceeded that of the largest elephants ; 

 and, at one period, he supposed that it was seven times larger. Pallas believed, that the 

 bones found in Siberia were those of the elephant and rhinoceros, and said that those 

 countries, which are now desolated by the rigours of intense cold, have formerly enjoyed 

 all the advantages of the southern latitudes. Gmelin supposes, that vast inundations in 

 the south had driven the elephants to the north, where they would all at once perish by 

 the rigour of the climate. Others were of opinion that the tusk and skeleton belonged 

 to the elephant, and the molares to the hippopotamus ; as the grinders were not those of 

 the former : some thought they were the bones of the hippopotamus only ; others of a 

 monster of the ocean ; and the Abbe Clavigero says, " that they may, from what appears, 

 have belonged to giants of the human, as well as of any other, race." Jefferson asserts 

 u that the skeleton of the mammoth bespeaks an animal of five or six times the cubit 

 volume of the elephant ; and that the grinders are five times as large, are square, and the 

 grinding surface studded with four or five rows of blunt points, whereas those of the 



