Discovering the Mammoth

by John J. McKay

  A century later, a second Greek writer described another type of unicorn. Megasthenes traveled to India on a diplomatic mission for the Selucid dynasty then ruling Persia. Despite being in India, he also never saw the animal and had to rely on descriptions provided by others. His animal was called a cartazon and lived in remote mountainous regions. It was considerably more exotic than Ctesias’s animal: “This creature is as large as a full-grown horse and has a mane and soft yellow hair. It is provided with excellent legs and is very swift, for its legs resemble those of an elephant being without joints. The tail is like a pig’s.” The idea that elephants do not have knees was denounced by Aristotle, but continued to repeated into the Renaissance. Megasthenes added a detail that would become important fourteen centuries later. The horn, he said, grows “not symmetrically but with natural twists.” He does not mention any medicinal uses for the horn or any other part of the cartazon.

  Modern writers tend to dismiss both descriptions as being of rhinoceroses, some kind of gazelle that is only ever seen in profile and from a distance, or a garbled mix of several animals. Other than being the size of a horse and having the single horn, the two descriptions don’t resemble each other. The body of Ctesias’s unicorn is nothing more than a distinctly colored wild ass while Megasthenes’s is a composite of other animal parts like a gryphon—a lion with the head, wings, and talons of an eagle—or a manticore—a scorpion-tailed sphynx—(which he also describes). It’s always possible that Ctesias’s and Megasthenes’s informants were just pulling their legs. Attempts to match the descriptions with animals in classical Indian literature have so far been fruitless, making it unlikely that we will ever know what they were told. The unicorn did not exist in the popular mind in the ancient world. It does not appear in poetry, drama, or art. For the six centuries after Ctesias, it appears only a handful of times and those were all in the context of learned men writing about natural history. They wanted to know exactly what kind of an animal the unicorn was. How should it be grouped with other animals? Was it the only animal with one horn? Pliny listed six single-horned animals including the rhinoceros and a type of Arabian gazelle. Julius Caesar calmly reported a single-horned animal in the Hercynian Forest, which stretched eastward from Germany and was the edge of the known world for Romans.

  This changed with the spread of Christianity. Sometime in the early years of the Church—possibly as early as the second century—a type of book called the Physiologus began to circulate. These books were collections of short essays on various animals, and sometimes plants, made up of quotes from the works of respected ancient authors followed by moral lessons exemplified by each animal. In the late Middle Ages simplified versions of the Physiologus would be called bestiaries. It was through these books that the unicorn was introduced to the masses. The earliest of these described an animal much smaller than those of Ctesias’s and Megasthenes’s. It looked like a kid goat but was ferocious and dangerous. It could only be captured by a virgin who would sit in a meadow. The unicorn would come to her and lay its head in her lap. After that she, sometimes assisted by a huntsman, would take it to the king. This drama was immortalized in friezes and tapestries. In time the unicorn grew in size eventually becoming once again the size of a horse and it was usually portrayed as the horse-like creature that we know today. The horn, called an alicorn, grew even faster. Ctesias (fourth century BCE) wrote that the horn was one cubit (eighteen inches) in length. Pliny (first century CE) wrote that it was three feet long, Isidore of Seville (seventh century) wrote that it was four feet long, and Albertus Magnus (thirteenth century) made it a whopping ten feet long. Skeptics pointed out that a unicorn would have to be as big as a ship to support such a horn. Albertus wasn’t speculating when he specified that size. By his day, Norse colonists had begun bringing narwhal horns to Europe from Greenland and other cold seas. Norway was very secretive about its fishing grounds and knowledge of the animal that produced the horns was slow to spread. These horns had spiral grooves exactly like the ones artists had been portraying for a thousand years and easily could be ten feet long.

  As improbable as ten-foot horns sounded, there was a growing market for alicorns making people want there to be bigger horns, which could be sold for more and which were impressive trophies for their owners. In the late Middle Ages, Europe began to descend into a poison panic. Ctesias’s statement that alicorns were both protection against and a cure for poison led the rich and powerful to seek them out to an unprecedented degree. Poison, as a tool to get rid of political opponents, relatives, and generally inconvenient people is as old as politics and wills. Essays on poison and antidotes to poison have been found among the earliest documents of all of the civilizations of the Old World. Entire industries have grown up around manufacturing poisons, poisoning, preventing poisoning, and curing the poisoned. Throughout history, some people have had very good reasons to fear being poisoned. However, there have been times when poison fears have gripped societies, fears that far overestimated the abilities of poisoners and the desirability of many who imagined themselves to be targets. Given the state of the medical practice, disease theory, and forensics in Renaissance Europe, it was easy for people see poisoning in every unexplained or sudden death. As in any irrational panic, mercenary minded people were ready to exploit public fears to their advantage. Some used mysterious deaths as an excuse to incite mob action against their personal enemies or against outsider groups. Occasionally this led to pogroms against Jews and Roma. The less murderously inclined saw in these fears a way to turn a fast buck. Some sold manuals and tools for poisoners. Others sold antidotes and protective amulets, such as unicorn horn.

  By the peak of the poison panic in the mid-sixteenth-century, tiny fragments labeled as alicorn were selling for ten times the price of gold. A large piece of horn could command twice that or even more. A complete and well-shaped narwhal tusk was something that only kings and cardinals could afford. To meet the demand, any intriguing-looking bits of bone were sold as alicorn. Paranoid buyers snapped up white stalactites because their tapering shape could be mistaken for a horn. Foreign craftsmen were reputed to know the secret of straightening elephant or walrus ivory. It’s almost certain that some bits of mammoth ivory were drafted into service as alicorns. Finally, fossils, plain white rocks, and even vials of water that once ostensibly been touched by an alicorn could be sold for ridiculous prices. At the same time that the demand and price of alicorn were inflating, so were its reputed medical properties. By the time the panic peaked, alicorn provided “effectuall cure these diseases: Scurvy, Old Ulcers, Dropsie, Running Gout, consumptions, Distillations, Coughs, Palpitation of the Heart, Fainting Fits, Convulsions, Kings Evil, Rickets in Children, Melancholly or Sadness, The Green Sickness, Obstructions, and all Distempers proceeding from a Cold Cause.” Reports even surfaced that the horn could raise the dead. Well-meaning rulers ordered tests to protect buyers from fake alicorn (a Renaissance version of the FDA). These usually involved waving the purported alicorn at something like a poisonous snake to see if it was repelled or poisoning pigeons and seeing if it could revive them. A surprising number of products passed the tests.

  The alicorn’s very commercial success doomed the unicorn. Too many people were making a close study of the unicorn and nothing about it could stand up to extended scrutiny. Physicians questioned the idea of a universal antidote. Nature, they believed, was composed of paired opposites, hot versus cold, wet versus dry. How could the same medicine counteract a wet poison and also a dry poison, a warm poison, and a cold poison? Naturalists hunted the world for the unicorn animal and found hints and claims, but no actual unicorns. A mere two years after Girolamo Maggi challenged the historical realty of giants, similarly Andrea Marini challenged the reality of unicorns. In his Discorso contra la falsa opinione dell’ Alicorno (Speech against the false belief in Unicorns), published in 1566, Marini asserts that the traditions about the unicorn and the medicinal properties of the alicorn are so wide and varied that they could n
ot possibly describe one thing. He suspects that the horns in the north, especially those found by the English, must come from a marine animal. As for its medicinal properties, Marini stated that though alicorn might be effective against fevers and poisonings coming from a cold, dry cause, it is no more effective than a common stag’s horn. More than anything, he feels that purchasers of alicorn are being taken advantage of by unscrupulous merchants. Marini was almost immediately answered by Andrea Bacci, a rising star and future physician to the pope. Bacci argues that the traditions surrounding the unicorn are confused because it is so rare and not native to Europe. He makes the traditional argument from authority with an added bit of class snobbery: if the unicorn was merely a superstition of vulgar, common people, we might have cause to question it, but as the greatest minds of the past believed in it, we do not. As to its medicinal properties, this is proved by its very rareness. God made it rare because it is special; things special to God must have extraordinary properties. For the time being, Marini and Bacci’s debate didn’t change popular opinions about the unicorn, but it did set the terms of the debate as it would develop in the next century.

  One other important writer commented on the unicorn before the century was over. This was none other than Habicot’s teacher, Ambroise Paré. Paré was the surgeon to the court of France. In that position, he had to be careful expressing his doubt. His employers had expended exorbitant sums on alicorns and he had to be careful not to say anything that would embarrass them. He could have stayed quiet, but he was of the same mind as Marini, in that he hated charlatans and itched to expose frauds. In 1580, Paré was called upon to tend to Chevalier Christofle des Ursins who had an infected injury caused by a fall from his horse. Des Ursins was interested in the specifics of his care and asked why Paré didn’t use famous medicines such as dried mummy or ground alicorn. Paré was able to reject the first treatment by saying it was improper for a good Christian to consume the flesh of a dead pagan. For the latter, he explained that his own experiments, which had involved poisoning a condemned prisoner and giving him a healthy dose of alicorn, had shown that its properties had been highly exaggerated. Des Ursins was so impressed by Paré’s knowledge that he insisted he write it out for the good of humanity. Paré repeats many of the same arguments that Marini used and supplements them with additional experiments that don’t involve killing servants. In the end, he concludes that while there might be a rare, one-horned animal found in nature, the alicorn had very little use in medicine, if any. He lamented that his main purpose in using it was because his customers demanded it. If he failed to prescribe it and the patient died, he would be in danger of lawsuits or worse.

  While the debate over alicorns and unicorns continued to simmer, Habicot for his part refused to respond to Riolan about giants and a full year passed before the debate flared up again. In March 1615, an anonymous pamphlet appeared titled Discours apologétique touchant la vérité des Géants (Apologetic speech concerning the truth about Giants), generally credited to Charles Guillemeau, the personal surgeon to the king. As he had been attending the king since 1612, he probably had seen the bones when they were brought to the palace. Being a surgeon, the author opens with a full-throated defense of the guild. On matters more closely related to the bones of Theutobochus, the author brings down a pox on both houses in the debate, but a much bigger pox on Riolan’s house. His argument is that the truth of giants is unassailable, being based on Holy Scripture and the wisdom of the church fathers. Riolan, he writes, committed sacrilege by denying the reality of giants. Habicot’s sin, he says, was getting involved with the charlatan Mazurier. Even this mild criticism from his own side was too much for Habicot. The following month he issued a thirty-six-page response in which he repeated his previous arguments and finished with with his own defense of the guild. The most significant aspect of this response was his confidence that his original conclusions were correct. While Riolan had been confident that the bones were not those of a giant, he had wavered over just what they were. Habicot was unchanging in his faith that the bones were those of a human giant and that the giant had been Theutobochus. After that, the duelists were quiet for two years until, in 1617, something provoked Riolan to return to the field. In fairly short order he published two brief pamphlets that were nothing more than collections of cheap shots at Habicot. Habicot fired back and Riolan issued one more collection of insults, but the end was near. In 1618, they each published small books summing up everything that had been said before and laying out their final arguments in detail.

  Riolan, finally leaving aside his anonymity and publishing under his name, was first with Gigantologie: Histoire de la Grandeure des Geants (Gigantologie: The history of the Greatness of Giants), probably published near the beginning of the year. He attacks the idea of the aging of the world but is careful not to suggest that the idea came from the Bible. He credits it to the Greek philosophical school of the Epicureans. This identification is safe because the Classical Greeks were, after all, pagans. He tells his readers that the idea of the aging of the world does not make any sense. Old age is marked by sterility, not by shrinking. He allows that people before the Flood might have been a little taller than modern people—say, nine or ten feet tall. Genesis says there were giants then, but since the Flood we’ve all been about the same size. He also allows that from time to time there have been people of extraordinary height, like Goliath and Charlemagne, but that they have been rare and that their height was exaggerated by the writers of their time. The maximum height possible for a human is fifteen feet, eighteen tops. Next, he analyzes the possible explanations for reports of giants. Bones and teeth found near the sea could come from whales, nereids, sirens, or unknown monsters. There have been many reputable accounts of such discoveries. He counts St. Augustine’s tooth among these. They could come from elephants brought by Hannibal or the Romans. Elephants are reported to have knees similar to a human’s as well as five toes. Lacking a skull, the bones could easily be mistaken for a human giant by a person without his advanced anatomical knowledge. They could be “fossils,” in the same vein as stalagmites or crystals. He describes various reported oddities taken from the earth shaped like a brain, praying hands, a woman’s “shameful parts,” and bones. He mentions an episode of German workers digging a foundation who came across objects that looked exactly like pots made by a master craftsman. That’s an archaeological site that we today will sadly never get to examine. He refuses to choose among the possibilities. His message is that the bones could be anything at all—except a giant. To drive his points home, he concludes with an abridged version of his 1614 pamphlet L’imposture descouverte.

  Later in the year, Habicot presented his rebuttal, titled Antigigantologie: Contre Discours de la Grandeur des Geans (Antigigantologie: Against the Discourse on the Greatness of Giants). His arguments are the exact inverse of Riolan’s. Riolan examined the possible explanations for giant bones in the earth and concluded that any of them was possible except that they were a human giant. Habicot examined the possible explanations for giant bones in the earth and concluded that none of them was possible except that they were a human giant. Monsters are defective and against nature. They have two heads or six feet. The bones of his giant were perfect. They had the right shape and there were the right number of them. This claim was helped by his never having seen the skull, only teeth. The bones could not come from a whale. Whales are much bigger than his bones and have no teeth or feet. The bones could not have come from an elephant. The bones are bigger than an elephant’s. Elephants do not have heels and their teeth are different from his giant’s. As for fossils, he argues semantically. Bones, in all of their complexity, do not fit into any of the categories of fossils described by the great authorities. They are not crystals. They are not metals generated by the influence of the planets. They are not shapeless stones or rocks containing superficial resemblances to the outer world. He adds one more argument not based on anything Riolan has said but based on old dualistic pr
operties: of all the dualistic properties an object can demonstrate—hot/cold, wet/dry, heavy/light—only bones have the combination that makes them recognizable as bones. Having laid out these arguments in the first part of his book, the second part is a point-by-point annotation and response to Riolan’s L’imposture descouverte.

  Habicot had the last word. Between his own arguments and his line-by-line response to L’imposture descouverte, he inserted the texts of three letters. The first is from Mazurier in 1614, saying that he had forwarded to Langon Habicot’s request for some documentation of the discovery, particularly the notarized statement to Constable Assalin. The second is an undated note from Langon to Habicot in which he assures the surgeon that the doctors of Grenoble and Montpellier had authenticated the bones as coming from a human giant. He promises to send the statement, a coin, and everything else the king had requested just as soon as he returns from his current business trip. The third letter is from Mazurier to Habicot dated June 1618. In this he reports that he heard Langon was finally on his way to Paris with bones and the notarized statement to show the king. He does not say that Langon was bringing any parts of the tomb. Riolan never responds. Did Langon provide the king with everything Mazurier said? If he did, no records have survived. From Riolan’s perspective, it wouldn’t have mattered. The letter from Langon confirming the reality of the discovery and that Marshal Lesdiguieres was satisfied that the bones were those of a human giant was enough to end the dispute. Riolan could claim that, as a doctor, his opinions were more valid than those of a mere surgeon, but he could not challenge the word of Langon and Marshal Lesdiguieres. The marshal was one of the most powerful men in the kingdom, and Langon was no common landowner, he was the Marquis de Langon, Baron d’Uriage, and Lord of Saint-Julien, Montrigaud, and other places. In the pecking order of the kingdom, Riolan was below both of them. It would have been dangerous to pick a fight with them.