Account of the Skeleton of the Mammoth

Receive, Sir, as a small testimony of my high respect for a Character rendered illustrious in the paths of Science, this plain recital of Facts, and first publication, derived from authentic sources, on a subject in which You have declared Yourself to feel the most lively interest; and which must interest every thinking mind, delighting in the investigation of physical causes, or disposed “to look through Nature up to Nature’s God.”

The curiosity of the scientific world has for a long time been justly excited by the fossil remains of a non-descript animal, which have been found in North America and Siberia, but generally in so mutilated a condition as to give but very imperfect ideas either of the size or kind of animal to which they must have belonged. The first account of them which we can find, is in the fifth volume of Jones’s Philosophical Transactions abridged, part second, page 159, in an extract of a letter from Dr. Mather to Dr. Woodward, dated Boston, Nov. 17, 1712; in which the Doctor gives an account of a large work in manuscript, intitled the Biblia Americana. This work Dr. Mather recommends to the patronage of some Mecænas, to promote the publication of. As a specimen of it he transcribes a passage out of it, being a note on that passage in Genesis, chap. vi. verse 4, relating to giants; and confirms the opinion of there having been in the antediluvian world men of a very large and prodigious stature, by the bones and teeth of some large animals found lately in Albany in New England, which, for some reasons, he thinks to be human; particularly a tooth brought from the place where it was found to New York in 1705, being a very large grinder, weighing four pounds and three quarters; with a bone supposed to be a thigh-bone, seventeen feet long. He also mentions another tooth, broad and flat like a fore-tooth, four fingers broad; the bones crumble to pieces in the air after they are dug up; they were found near a place called Cluverack, about thirty miles on this side Albany. He then gives the description of one which he resembles to the eye-tooth of a man: He says it has four prongs or roots, flat and something worn on the top; it was six inches high, wanting one-eighth as it stood upright on the root, and almost thirteen inches in circumference; it weighed two pounds four ounces Troy weight. There was another near a pound heavier, found under the bank of Hudson’s River, about fifty leagues from the sea, a great way beneath the surface of the earth, where the ground is of a different colour and substance from the other ground, for seventy-five feet long, which they suppose to be from the rotting of the body, to which these bones and teeth did, as he supposes, once belong. It were to be wished he had given an exact figure of these bones and teeth.

This account is only worth preserving, as it fixes the time at which these extraordinary remains of antiquity were first discovered in America, previous to their being found in Siberia. The supposition that they were the bones of a giant was scarcely less probable than that they should have belonged to a quadruped of which not the smallest vestige could be traced.—Prepossessed, therefore, with the certainty of their being human bones, a calculation was made of the height of the supposed giant, very probably from a broken piece of thigh-bone, and a length of seventeen feet was calculated in proportion to the thickness of that which was subject to their examination; for take either half of these thigh-bones, and nothing can more resemble that of the human leg, until the whole is seen together, when, from its thickness, it is evidently that of a quadruped, the human thigh being very long and slender. The seventy-five feet of black earth, which they calculated to be the length of a man whose thigh-bone was supposed seventeen feet, could have been nothing but a small morass divested of its water; and hence the decayed state of the bones.

It appears that about the year 1740, great numbers of bones, of a similar kind, were found in Kentucky on the Ohio; but they were collected with such eagerness, and forwarded to Europe so hastily, that it shortly became impossible to distinguish one set of bones from another, so as to ascertain their number, proportion, and kind; parts of the same animal having been scattered over England, France, and Germany, and there compared with similar ones from Siberia. Buffon^[1] speaking of one of these thigh-bones brought from the Ohio by the way of Canada, which he describes as being the tenth of an inch shorter than one from Siberia, and yet an inch thicker, says; “This disproportion is so great as hitherto to deceive me with respect to this bone, though it otherwise resembles, both in the external figure and internal structure, the femur of the elephant (he should have said, the femur found in Siberia), mentioned under the number DCDLXXXVII. The difference in thickness, which appeared excessive, seemed sufficient to attribute this bone to another animal which must have been larger than the elephant; but as no such animal is known, recourse must be had to the pretended MAMMOTH, a fabulous animal supposed to inhabit the regions of the north, where are frequently found bones, teeth, and tusks of the elephant.” Here again the word elephant is improperly introduced; Messrs. Buffon and Daubenton