In the course of these raging debates, one thing both Habicot and Riolan had admitted was that neither had ever seen an elephant. They could not perform comparative anatomy because they had nothing to compare the bones to. Since Roman times only a handful of elephants had been seen north of the Alps. The illustrations in bestiaries were fanciful and wildly inaccurate, based on the writers of antiquity and not on the observations of recent travelers. The entry on elephants in Konrad Gessner’s influential natural history, Historiae animalium, showed a big gray animal with an approximately correct body shape, giant ears like folding fans, tusks that pointed straight down like fangs, and a trunk like a vacuum cleaner hose. The closest thing they had to an anatomical essay was a letter written by Pierre Gilles, a member of a French embassy to the Ottoman Empire, to the bishop of Syria in 1548 describing the autopsy of a young elephant in very general terms. There were no drawings of an elephant’s skeleton available to Habicot or Riolan.
This situation had already begun to change during their lifetimes. Stories of monarchs exchanging animals as gifts date back almost to the beginnings of recorded history. Most educated Europeans of the day would have been familiar with the elephant Abul-Abbas gave to Charlemagne by the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid and the elephant given by Louis IX of France to Henry III of England in 1255, which became the namesake of the Elephant and Castle district of South London. Animals that are strange and wonderful, powerful and regal reflect on the greatness of the givers, the vastness of their realms, and their ability to control such things. It’s no coincidence that one of the first acts after Nixon and Mao began the process of regularizing diplomatic relations between their countries was an exchange of exotic animals, pandas from China and musk oxen from the United States. As the Portuguese began working their way down the African coast in the fifteenth century, looking for the sea route to India that they would find at the end of the century, they encountered and brought back exotic animals as tribute to the monarchs and patrons who sponsored them. The earliest animals were kept in the menagerie of the king. In 1514, Manuel I of Portugal sent a white elephant named Hanno to Pope Leo X as a coronation gift. Hanno died soon after. The next year, Sultan Muzafar II of Cambay sent Manuel a rhinoceros, the first seen in Europe in more than a thousand years. Manuel promptly regifted the rhino to the pope as a replacement for Hanno. Sadly, it drowned in a shipwreck before reaching Italy. The Portuguese monarchs handed out other elephants during the sixteenth century. Because they had only broken bones to work with, seeing a live elephant would have been of limited use to Habicot and Riolan, though it would have served to establish its general size and proportions. What they really needed was a detailed anatomical study with illustrations. This wouldn’t appear until the last quarter of the century, long after both men had died.
In the winter of 1613-1614, Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc passed through Paris and took note of the Theutobochus controversy. He could hardly have avoided it. Peiresc was one of the central figures in the Republic of Letters. It seems as if he corresponded with everyone about everything. Seven thousand of his letters have been published and boxes of them remain uncatalogued in various collections around Europe. He was also an accomplished scientist (he discovered the Orion nebula) and keen observer of the world around him. Peiresc arrived in Paris after Mazurier departed and never personally saw the bones. He only knew the controversy through the war of pamphlets. Among his surviving studied letters, the earliest indication of his interest in the matter was seventeen years later. In 1630, Thomas d’Arcos wrote to a common friend describing the discovery of the bones of a giant near Utica in modern Tunisia. This was the very place where St. Augustine’s giant tooth had been discovered. Once again, all of the bones turned to dust when the workmen tried to remove them from the ground. Only two teeth survived. Early the next year, d’Arcos acquired one of them and sent it to Peiresc. Peiresc thought the tooth looked familiar, but couldn’t remember where he had seen one before. At first, he thought it might have come from a marine monster like a whale or a hippo.
But then, it all came together for Peirsec. In 1626, Claude de Lorraine, duke of Chevreuse, had acquired an elephant, probably from the Dutch who, at the time, were wresting control of trade in the Indian Ocean from the Portuguese. When the elephant arrived, Pieresc heard about it and wrote a friend in Paris asking to compare some of Gilles’s descriptions to the live elephant. Pieresc wanted to know more. Two years later Claude rented the elephant to George Pierre, an officer who had served under him in one of the many wars of religion in that century. The contract they drew up gave Pierre the right to travel throughout the kingdom showing the elephant for two years beginning in May 1630. In November 1631, Peiresc heard that the elephant would be passing near Belgentier, his estate, and seized the opportunity to learn more. He convinced Pierre to drop by and stay for a few days. He spent the first part of the visit feeding the elephant treats so that it would become comfortable with him, and because he was curious about its diet. Later, Pierre demonstrated that it was gentle enough to let him examine its teeth. In a letter to Pierre Dupuy, the royal librarian, he described the scene: “I was curious enough, or (rather) mad enough, to introduce my hand in its mouth, and to catch and to feel one of its molar teeth, to better recognize the shape.” The elephant even let him make a wax cast of one of its upper teeth. He immediately recognized the shape as being the same as the one d’Arcos had sent him earlier that year. When writing to Dupuy he included a sketch of d’Arcos’s tooth.
Peiresc now became curious about other reports of giants’ bones. Could they all have come from elephants? He wrote to his correspondents in various parts of Europe where giants had been reported and asked for descriptions of the bones and the circumstances of their discovery. In August 1634, he received a package from Dr. Nivolet of Saint-Marcellin near the Langon estates in Dauphine. Nivolet recounted the Theutobochus story from memory. Despite being a physician, he was convinced that Habicot had been correct and that the bones belonged to a human giant. Nivolet was able to do more than retell a story; he visited the Chateau Langon and interviewed the marquis’s widow. The widow Langon showed Nivolet the remaining bones and medals. When Nivolet left, she gave him some bone fragments and one of the medals, all of which he forwarded to Peiresc. None of the bone fragments was large enough to identify other than to determine that they were unquestionably organic in nature and not “fossils.” Peiresc was an avid numismatist with a collection of coins and medals numbering 18,000 at the time of his death. After a short search, he was able to determine that the MA on the medals stood for the city of Marseilles, not for General Marius. Based on his historical knowledge, he was able to demolish the rest of the Theutobochus story. In particular, he was disturbed by the description of the tomb. Who would have built such a tomb? Theutobochus’s people were either killed or enslaved by Romans. Even if a small number had escaped those fates and paused to entomb their leader, they would not have inscribed his name in Latin. The Romans, he acknowledged, were a chivalrous people and might conceivably have built a tomb for a noble foe, but they would not have used vulgar brick or built it on a low sandy spot.
The widow Langon would not part with the teeth, but based on Nivolet’s description of the weight and size of the teeth alone, Peiresc was confident that the bones were those of an elephant. A second “giant” found in the vicinity of Chateau Langon that same year further convinced him that these were elephants and not historical humans, as only one Theutobochus was known to exist, not a nation of them. Peiresc remained interested in giants for the rest of his life. Even as he lay on he lay on his deathbed, he dictated letters to friends in Italy begging them to go to Sicily and investigate Boccaccio’s giant. He would not have been as confident in his conclusions about the Theutobochus bones if he had seen a tooth or if Nivolet had given a detailed description of one. The Theutobochus teeth were enamel-covered, four-cusped molars, much like a human’s, as opposed to the loaf-shaped teeth, with a wash-board surface that he h
ad seen on the teeth of the living elephant and one sent to him by d’Arcos. The fame of the bones led to them being saved by the Langon family for centuries. In 1984, Léonard Ginsburg tracked down the last known Theutobochus bone, a tooth, and identified it as the third right premolar of a Deinotherium giganteum, a strange-looking proboscidean from the mastodon side of the family. He also examined the drawing of d’Arcos’s African tooth and identified it as the upper left molar of one of the ancestors of modern African elephants.
In 1645, the twenty-seventh year of the Thirty Years War, Swedish armies inflicted a devastating blow on the imperial forces in Bohemia and swept into Austria with the aim of capturing Vienna. The imperial capital was not prepared to give up easily. Both sides soon found themselves digging in for a long siege, negotiating with allies for support, and building fortifications and counter-fortifications across the countryside. Upriver from Vienna, in the Krems district, while digging trenches, a group of Swedish soldiers discovered the bones of a giant. The discovery took place on St. Martin’s Day, November 11. The soldiers had been ordered to build a series of defensive fortifications around an old tower at a place called Laimstetten. The winter was not making their job any easier. Rain and groundwater filed the trenches. To deal with this, the engineers in charge ordered the men to dig a series of deep drainage ditches down the hillside. It was in one of those ditches, at a depth of three or four klatters (eighteen to twenty-four feet), in a layer of yellowish soil that smelled of decay, that they ran into a cache of enormous bones. The most impressive of the bones are described as being a skull as large as a medium-sized table, arms as thick as an average man, a shoulder-blade with a socket large enough to hold a 24-pound cannonball, and teeth weighing up to five pounds. Someone in charge ordered the diggers to save the bones so that they could be sent to learned men in Sweden and Poland for study. Once again, many of the bones, including the skull, fell to pieces as they were brought out. Once again, the workers were blamed for mishandling the bones. Two more giants were uncovered in the trench but, with a war to be fought, they were left in the trench and nothing more was said about them. After the Swedes left Krems, fathers from the local Jesuit monastery combed over the site and recovered a few good teeth that the Swedes had missed along with a cartload of unidentified fragments. They sent the best tooth to Emperor Ferdinand III, “an artful and intelligent man,” in Vienna.
The story of the Krems bones were first told just two years later in Theatrum Europaeum, a journal of contemporary German events. Theatrum was published, edited, and illustrated by the Merian family in Frankfort. The account is short, only 350 words, and written by Johann Peter Lotichius, the personal historian to Emperor Ferdinand. Lotichius tells us the facts of the discovery and the disposition of the bones but hazards no guesses as to what they might have been. Almost thirty years later, Peter Lambeck wrote a catalog of the imperial collections. He uses the Krems tooth as the opening to engage in an extended digression on giants. After repeating the most recent opinions on the truth of giants he comes to the conclusion that we must still believe in giants because the Bible tells us they existed, but that this tooth in particular did not come from one. He also rejects the theory that it came from a Carpathian dragon. He’s inclined to believe it came from an elephant. He then moves on to a two-headed chicken that apparently shared a shelf with the tooth.
Lotichius’s short account of the discovery is the only one we have. All later accounts are based on his. But it’s not the only evidence we have. Matthew Merian, the then-current head of the family publishing business, was an excellent engraver, as was his father before him and his son after him. Merian thought the story interesting enough that he visited the monastery and made a detailed illustration of a tooth the Jesuit brothers kept. It is the only illustration in that volume of Theatrum that is not a portrait or map. The illustration is of such fine quality that, centuries later, it is possible to identify it as coming from a young mammoth.
In 1911, two hundred and sixty-six years later, Othenio Abel went to Kremsmünster Abbey to help Father Leonard Angerer catalog the fossils stored there. In the more than two centuries since the Jesuit fathers had gathered the remains, several more mammoth teeth from the neighborhood had been donated to collection, and the abbey had changed hands from the Jesuits to the Benedictines. Figuring out which tooth came from Laimstetten would have been pure guesswork without Merian’s detailed illustration. After comparing the teeth in the collection, Abel found one that, accounting for some damage from handling over the centuries, was a very close match. Angerer was less confident because the tooth in his collection was heavier than the weight given by Merian. The visual match is so close that most later paleontologists have sided with Abel to say the original tooth, a mammoth’s tooth, is the one that still resides in the abbey.
As the century rolled on, skepticism about giants grew, but the belief in them never quite died out. At the same time, unicorns were suffering their own devaluation. While skepticism in both the animal and the medicinal substance grew, it was hard to completely abandon the belief, especially when large pieces of ivory, such as the ones Theophrastus had described, still turned up in different parts of Europe.
Otto von Geuricke was not a fool. During his lifetime, he was a philosopher, diplomat, mayor of Magdeburg for thirty-one years, and a respected scientist and inventor. It was for his work the last two capacities that he is probably best remembered. Geuricke invented the vacuum pump and performed public experiments with it that made him an influential member of the European scientific elite. With that resume, it might surprise some to find his name associated with unicorns. His description, published in 1672, is short. In its entirety, it reads:
It happened in the year 1663 in Quedlinburg, that on the Mountain the common people call Zeunickenberg, where lime is mined, inside the rock a unicorn skeleton was found. The rear portion of the body, as is common in a beast, lay back, head up, but, extending lengthwise from the brow was a horn, the thickness of a human leg, and so in proportion to the length of almost five cubits. Primarily through ignorance, the skeleton of the animal was broken and extracted in pieces. Together with the head with the horn and some ribs, spine, and bones, were given to the Reverend Princess Abbess of the place.
The passage gives no indication that Geuricke saw the bones himself, though he had plenty of opportunity to do so. Quedlinburg is less than thirty miles from Magdeburg, where he was mayor, and much of Guricke’s technical innovation was aimed at making mining safer and more efficient in places like Zeunickenberg. Guericke was an important enough scientist that his books were read and discussed all over Europe. Several of his peers, though not a great number, noticed this odd entry in his book. The Quedlinburg unicorn was mentioned a few times over the next decades. One of the most interesting retellings of the story appeared in a catalog and commentary on the great collections of Europe published in 1704 and reissued in 1714. Next to a short discussion of unicornu fossile, bemoaning the recent sharp drop in prices, the editor, Michael Bernard Valentini, included an illustration of three types of unicorns, unicornu fictitium, the fictitious unicorn, with a picture of the classic horse with a horn; unicornu marinum, the sea unicorn, with a picture of a narwhal; and unicornu fossile, with a picture of the Quedlinburg skeleton. The illustration is bizarre. There’s no other word for it. It is a side view of a skeleton with a horse-like skull bearing a long, straight horn. The spine of the animal is dead straight and follows the line of the horn. Only the front legs are present. They have hooves. The spine has some ribs and ends with a ring-shaped bone and three, small curved up bones that might indicate a tail. Valentini credited the drawing to Johann Mäyern, the astronomer of Quedlinburg. Mäyern (or Mayer or Meyer) published a popular almanac, but the illustration is not in any of the issues from those years (he died two years after the discovery). It is most likely that he published the story and illustration as a single-page broadside that has not survived. Valentini, repeating the story, created a small of amo
ut of interest in it. A few travelers mention dropping by the abbey to hunt for the bones. Unfortunately, they report, such curiosities were all kept unlabled in a store room. By then, the Abbess and other witnesses had all died. What they could confirm was that bones and ivory were regularly discovered in the mines and nearby caves.
Mäyern’s drawing might have dropped into obscurity had not a much better version of the unicornu fossile illustration appeared in a well-studied scientific work by the great Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. Leibniz is probably best known for being the co-inventor, along with Newton, of calculus but, like Geuricke, he had wide ranging interests and made important contributions to a number of disciplines. He wrote about philosophy, medicine, physics, linguistics, history, and politics. He tinkered with lamps, clocks, and pumps, and invented an adding machine. He also took a shot at geology and paleontology. In 1690, his patron, the elector of Hanover, commissioned him to write a history of the House of Brunswick. Leibniz chose to start with the geological prehistory of the land as a background for the human and dynastic history. That section of the history is the only part he completed. A large part of it dealt with fossils. Leibniz cataloged and analyzed the fossil shells in his region. Following that, he looked at some of the other difficult organic remains buried in the mountains. In discussing ivory found in the earth, which he had no problem believing was real, organic ivory, he gave a full section to retelling Geuricke’s story of the discovery. The plate prepared to illustrate it gave half of the page to Mäyern’s skeleton with the caption “Image of a skeleton excavated near Quedlinburg.” The other half of the page shows the tooth of a mammoth, which he captioned “Tooth of a marine animal unearthed from a hill of clay at Tidae, near Stederburg.”
Discovering the Mammoth Page 5
