Account of the Skeleton of the Mammoth: A non-descript carnivorous animal of immense size, found in America — John Shaqi
Account of the Skeleton of the Mammoth: A non-descript carnivorous animal of immense size, found in AmericaPeale, Rembrandt
History
Account of the Skeleton of the Mammoth: A non-descript carnivorous animal of immense size, found in America
Peale, Rembrandt
Mammoths -- North America
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._
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