27.5 
ON THE KANOE OF THE MAMMOTH. 
By W. Boyd Dawkins, M.A., F.R.S. 
Fossil remains of the elephant have attracted the notice of 
man from the days of Alexander the Great down to the present 
time. Theophrastus, the son of a fuller of Lesbos and a pupil 
of Aristotle, was the first to put the discovery of fossil ivory 
and bones * on record, his attention having most probably been 
given to the neighbouring ossiferous deposit of Upper Lydia, 
whence the country people, some five hundred years afterwards, 
obtained tusks which Pausanias describes as horns.t Hnring 
the last three centuries many curious stories were framed to 
account for the presence of the large fossil bones and teeth in 
Northern and Central Europe. In 1577 Professor Felix Platen | 
of Basel, constructed out of some elephantine remains that 
were found in Lucerne, the drawing of a giant nineteen feet 
high, which the Lucernois adopted as a supporter in their coat 
of arms. This amazing discovery of a nameless giant was -ex^ 
celled by that made in 1613 near St. Antoine. An elephant’s 
skeleton from that place was exhibited in Paris as having been 
found in a tomb thirty feet long, on which was engraved in 
Gothic characters, Teutobochus Eex,” and as belonging there- 
fore to the Cymbrian chief of that name who fought against 
Marius. The imposture was exposed by M. Riolan, after a con- 
troversy almost as famous as that over the Moulin Quignon 
jaw. Even so late as 1645 a skeleton of an elephant found near 
Crems in Austria with “ a head as big as a middle-sized table ” 
and with “ the bone of his arm as big as a man’s middle,” was 
considered to be of human origin. Hr. Behrens, the quaint 
author of the ‘‘ Natural History of the Hartz Forest,” argues 
that this cannot be true, because of its large size; § for the 
tallest man we know of was Og of Basan, whose bed is said in 
Deuteronomy, chap, iii., to have been eighteen feet long ; now, 
allowing the bed to be but one foot longer than the man,. he 
* De Lapidibiis, p. 298, line 9. t Attic, lib. i. cap. xxxv. 
X Cuvier Oss. Goss. t. 1, art. Elepbas. § Page 25, 
