London,
October, 1802.
ACCOUNT
OF
The Skeleton
OF
THE MAMMOTH.
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.