In 1860 a great number of bones of the Mammoth, with remains of Hyæna,
Horse, Reindeer, Rhinoceros-megarhinus, and Bison, were found in Belgium
in digging a canal at Lierre, in the province of Antwerp. An entire
skeleton of a young Mammoth, eleven feet six inches high (to the
shoulder), has been reconstructed from these remains by M. Dupont, and
is now placed in the Royal Museum of Natural History in Brussels.[98]
[98] H. Woodward, _Geological Magazine_, vol. viii., p. 193.
We cannot doubt, after such testimony, of the existence in the frozen
north, of the almost entire remains of the Mammoth. The animals seem to
have perished suddenly; enveloped in ice at the moment of their death,
their bodies have been preserved from decomposition by the continued
action of the cold. If we suppose that one of those animals had sunk
into a marsh which froze soon afterwards, or had fallen accidentally
into the crevasse of some glacier, it would be easy for us to understand
how its body, buried immediately under eternal ice, had remained there
for thousands of years without undergoing decomposition.
In Cuvier’s great work on _fossil bones_, he gives a long and minute
enumeration of the various regions of Germany, France, Italy, and other
countries, which have furnished in our days bones or tusks of the
Mammoth. We venture to quote two of these descriptions:--“In October,
1816,” he says, “there was discovered at Seilberg, near Canstadt, in
Würtemberg, near which some remarkable discoveries were made in 1700, a
very remarkable deposit, which the king, Frederick I., caused to be
excavated, and its contents collected with the greatest care. We are
even assured that the visit which the prince, in his ardour for all that
was great, paid to this spot, aggravated the malady of which he died a
few days after. An officer, Herr Natter, commenced some excavations, and
in four-and-twenty hours discovered twenty-one teeth or fragments of
teeth of elephant, mixed with a great number of bones. The king having
ordered him to continue the excavations, on the second day they came
upon a group of thirteen tusks heaped close upon each other, and along
with them some molar teeth, lying as if they had been packed
artificially. It was on this discovery that the king caused himself to
be transported thither, and ordered all the surrounding soil to be dug
up, and every object to be carefully preserved in its original position.
The largest of the tusks, though it had lost its points and its roots,
was still eight feet long and one foot in diameter. Many isolated tusks
were also found, with a quantity of molar teeth, from two inches to a
foot in length, some still adhering to the jaws. All these fragments
were better preserved than those of 1700, which was attributed to the
depth of the bed, and, perhaps, to the nature of the soil. The tusks
were generally much curved. In the same deposit some bones of Horses and
Stags were found, together with a quantity of teeth of the Rhinoceros,
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