In 1564 two peasants observed on the banks of the Rhone, along a slope, some great bones sticking out of the ground. These they carried to the neighbouring village, where they were examined by Cassanion, who lived at Valence, and was the author of a treatise on giants (_De Gigantibus_). Cuvier concluded from this writer's description of the tooth that it belonged to an elephant. Otto de Guericke, famous as the inventor of the air-pump, in 1663 witnessed the discovery of a fossil elephant, with its tusks preserved. These he mistook for horns; so did even the illustrious Leibnitz, who created out of his own imagination a strange animal, with a great horn in the middle of its forehead, as the creature to which these remains belonged! One is reminded of Bret Harte's amusing _jeu d'esprit, The Society upon the Stanislaus_-- "Then Brown he read a paper, and he reconstructed there, From those same bones, an animal that was extremely rare;" and how the members of this learned society came to blows over their fossil bones, and hurled them at one another--"till the skull of an old mammoth caved the head of Thomson in." But in this case, the "animal that was extremely rare" was believed in for a long time, and Leibnitz's "fossil unicorn" was universally accepted throughout Germany for more than thirty years. At last, however, a complete skeleton of a Mammoth was discovered, and recognised as belonging to an elephant; but the unicorn was not given up without a keen controversy.[60] [60] The writer is indebted for much of the information here given with regard to the discoveries of Mammoth bones, and legends founded thereon, to M. Figuier's _World before the Deluge_. Near the city of Constadt, in the year 1700, a great quantity of bones and tusks of elephants were discovered, after excavations had been made by order of the reigning duke, who had been informed by a soldier of Würtemberg of the presence of bones in the soil. In this way some sixty tusks were unearthed. The whole ones were preserved, but those which were broken were given to the Court physician, who made use of them for medicinal purposes. After this the "Ebur fossile," or "Unicornu fossile," was freely used by the German doctors, until the discovery of the bone-caves of the Hartz, when it became too abundant to pass for true unicorn, and consequently lost much of its repute.