Once he had determined that the bones and ivory were real organic remains and that they belonged to an elephant, Tentzel attacked the problem of how the skeleton of an elephant came to be buried in central Germany. He considered only two possibilities: that someone had brought the elephant there when it was alive, or that it had floated there during the Deluge after it had drowned. He did not consider the possibility that elephants had once been native to Germany. Tentzel was aware of other bones and teeth found around Europe. He mentions specifically Boccaccio’s Sicilian giant, the Krems teeth, and the Theutobochus bones. In his opinion, they were all almost certainly from elephants. He understands that the problem isn’t just this one elephant; it is that there are the remains of many elephants spread across Germany and other parts of Europe. To those who thought that the elephants had been brought north by the Romans or the Huns or had been the famous elephants owned Charlemagne, Henry II, or others, he had one question: Why did they leave the ivory behind? “The use of ivory,” he wrote, “which is very ancient, will not allow us to believe that upon burying the elephant there they should neglect to take away the teeth, which are very large and fine.” He followed this by saying he found it hard to believe that anyone would dig a pit twenty-four feet deep to bury their dead elephant. This observation introduced his treatment of the Deluge. Tentzel carefully examined the strata of soil around the skeleton and determined that the layers above had never been disturbed. Even if the owner of the elephant had dug a twenty-four-foot pit to bury it, leaving behind the ivory, the soil above the elephant would have been mixed together. What he observed were seven undisturbed strata above the white sand where it lay. The primary mechanism for laying down strata that Tentzel was aware of was sedimentation beneath bodies of water. He was familiar with Steno’s work, but rejected the concept of deep time. He preferred to believe that the strata had been all laid down at once. When Aurelius and Didius get their turn to speak, to Tentzel’s credit, they give an accurate summary of the doctors’ position rather than a rude parody of it. Nevertheless, they still lose the debate.
One of the readers of the Monatliche article (and possibly a subscriber) was Leibniz. Soon after the issue came out he wrote to Tentzel to express his qualified support. He begins by saying he completely agrees that the doctors are wrong. In writing his Protogaea, Leibniz had studied fossil shells and bones and come to the conclusion that the great majority of them are the real remains of organic creatures. He categorically denies that the Tonna bones could be jokes of nature. His reservations are with Tentzel’s conclusion that his bones come from an elephant. He agrees that the climate in Germany had never been suitable for elephants. His preferred explanation is that the bones had once belonged to some kind of unknown marine animal “similar to the elephant.” The same illustration he used to show the Quedlinburg unicorn included a mammoth’s tooth labeled “Tooth of a marine animal.” Most of the fossils that Leibniz features in the Protogaea are seashells. They are found in all of the parts of northern Germany and are especially common in the Netherlands. From this he concludes that that Thuringia had once been the northern coast of Germany and home to walruses. In the many centuries since the Deluge, northern Germany had been slowly covered by soil brought down by rivers from the Alps and other mountains of southern Germany. Three weeks later, Tentzel wrote back to say that he is still confident that the bones are those of an elephant. To support this, he points out that elephants and walruses have very different bodies and that the Tonna bones were of a creature many times larger than a walrus.
Though Tentzel was confident in his conclusion that the bones belonged to an elephant, it didn’t stop him from hunting for additional confirmation. He knew that there was another complete elephant’s skeleton he could compare with the Tonna bones. That elephant, named Hansken, was quite famous. After the Dutch East India Company beat the Portuguese out of the India trade, one of their agents acquired a young female elephant in Ceylon in 1637. Once in Europe, her owners taught her to wave a flag, beat a drum, manipulate small objects, and other tricks, and sent her on a tour of the continent, where she performed before paying audiences. After eighteen years on the road, she injured her foot in Italy, developed an infection, and died in Florence on November 9, 1655. Grand Duke Ferdinando II had a special mass written for her. Ferdinando II was tutored as a child by Galileo and grew to be a patron of the sciences. He had most of the good parts of Hansken removed before burying her. He had the skeleton mounted as accurately as possible and had her skin stuffed with straw for display in his collection. In July, Tentzel wrote a letter to Antonio Magliabechi, the personal librarian to Cardinal Leopoldo de Medici, the brother of the grand duke. Magliabechi was one of the major figures of the Republic of Letters during that generation and was widely renowned for his erudition, encyclopedic memory, and disgusting personal hygiene. He had been a friend of Steno’s and was familiar with his theories about the organic origin fossils. In his letter, Tentzel repeated most what he had written in Monatliche Unterredungen, leaving out the literary flourishes and defense of the doctors’ position. Tentzel wanted Magliabechi to approve his interpretation of the bones and hoped he would send a detailed description of Hansken’s bones and loan him one or two to compare with those in his possession. Magliabechi enthusiastically endorsed Tentzel’s conclusions and sent the detailed description he requested, but no bones. Italian scholars, as opposed to those north of the Alps, had no trouble accepting the presence of elephants on their lands. Historical records told of many elephants that had been in Italy during Roman times. First, there were the war elephants of Pyrrus and Hannibal. Later, there were the large numbers of elephants brought by the Romans to be slaughtered in the circuses for entertainment. Fossil elephants regularly turned up and, thanks to Hansken, were easily recognized as such, though always credited to historical times. Magliabechi forwarded Tentzel’s letter to several other Italian thinkers, who also agreed with his conclusions. They wrote their own pamphlets and letters to journals in support. One, Paolo Boccone, who was familiar with Hansken’s skeleton, made a trip to Gotha to examine the Tonna bones.
After writing to Magliabechi, Tentzel and Leibniz engaged in a new round of correspondence on the subject that lasted for the rest of the summer. In his first letters, Leibniz concedes that an elephant is a more likely source for the bones than a sea creature, but says that a sea creature is still his preferred solution. The sea, he writes, produces animals, such as whales, that are much larger than land animals. He then goes on to outline his theories of the ancient earth. Referring to his belief that northern Germany was underwater in the post-Deluge era, he says that “the Earth has undoubtedly undergone greater changes than the common man thinks.” The Deluge is not necessarily the only possible explanation for the presence of elephant bones at Tonna. He offers two additional explanations: Germany might once have been warmer than is is today, or there might once have been elephants that were adapted to a colder climate. He’s vague about when this time might have been. For the former, he refers to Thomas Burnett’s theory that the earth’s axis might once have been perpendicular to the ecliptic rather than tilted as it is today. This would have made all the earth comfortably warm, rather than hot at the equator and frozen at the poles. In this climate, normal elephants could have flourished in Germany. He leaves out the inconvenient detail that Burnett thought that the catastrophe responsible for the shift in the earth’s axis also caused the Deluge. Of the two theories, Leibniz thinks the second is more likely; there might once have been elephants that were adapted to Germany’s climate, an idea he had rejected a few months earlier. He points out that there are many species in the new world that are unknown in the old. By his own theory that there have been many smaller, regional catastrophes since the Deluge, it makes sense that there have been many regional extinctions. How many species must have been lost when Atlantis sank, he asks?
In a letter written in August, Leibniz is careful to assure Tentzel that, when he says species were lost,
he is not claiming that the species are totally extinct: “I think we must distinguish between extinct species and those that have greatly changed.” At the time that they corresponded, total extinction was an unthinkable, even heretical, idea. Extinction implied a flaw in God’s creation. Since Aristotle, the dominant philosophies in Europe had treated all that existed as a ranked hierarchy known as the scala naturæ (ladder of nature) or great chain of being. At the top sat God. At the bottom was common dirt. In between were angels and demons, celestial bodies, humans (ranked according to class), land animals, fish, plants, and minerals. There was a place for everything and everything was in its place. For the chain to be perfect, every part must have a role to play in maintaining a harmonious whole. Alexander Pope, in his “Essay on Man,” described this problem:
Vast chain of being! which from God began,
Natures ethereal, human, angel, man,
Beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eye can see,
No glass can reach; from Infinite to thee,
From thee to nothing. On superior powers
Were we to press, inferior might on ours:
Or in the full creation leave a void,
Where, one step broken, the great scale’s destroyed:
From Nature’s chain whatever link you strike,
Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.
If links could be removed without destroying the whole chain, they must have been superfluous in the first place. It was inconceivable that God would create things with no purpose, and thus the issue with extinction in this worldview.
In the variation of the scala naturæ that Leibniz subscribed to, ladders or chains were not the best metaphors. These implied an abrupt jump from one species to the next. His school envisioned each species flowing into the next by way of different breeds and hybrids, a principle he called lex continui. Tentzel and Leibniz’s correspondent John Ray summarized the idea: “Nature, as the saying goes, makes no jumps and passes from extreme to extreme only through a mean. She always produces species intermediate between higher and lower types, species of doubtful classification linking one type with another and having something common with both.” Leibniz had a very broad concept of species. To him, a large group of animals that shared an “inner nature” could all be considered a single species. Following his statement that remains that appear to be extinct were really animals that had greatly changed, he gave examples: “Thus he dog and wolf, cat and tiger can be seen as being of the same species. The same can be said about the amphibious animals or marine oxen [walruses] once analogous to the elephant.” Forms could come and go without the species itself going extinct. A cold-adapted elephant had the same relation to a tropical elephant as a shepherd dog to a terrier.
Leibniz’s idea that a species could change and adapt required a certain amount of time that was not obvious in the traditional biblical chronology. His belief that the North German Plain had once been a sea that had gradually filled with silt from the eroding Alps also required time. Leibniz and Tenzel were both familiar with an author who had begun to address the issue of time and change. Niels Steensen, better known to the English-speaking world as Steno, has a good claim to be one of the founders of both geology and paleontology. He wouldn’t have thought so, if for no other reason than that neither word had been coined yet. Steno was trained as a doctor and had a strong interest in anatomy. His search for an ideal position led him from his home in Denmark to Tuscany, where Grand Duke Ferdinando II, the owner of Hansken’s remains, hired him as his personal physician in 1666.
Several months after Steno arrived at the court, fishermen in Livorno landed a huge shark. The grand duke heard about it and ordered its head brought to Florence so Steno could examine it. The head was getting rather ripe when he began his dissection, but this did not prevent a large crowd of academy members and courtiers from gathering to watch. Steno started on the top of the head, examining the skin and brain, which he found surprisingly small, before rolling it over to look at the mouth. In examining them he was struck by the resemblance between the teeth and glossopetrae, or “tongue stones,” as they were known. These distinctive triangular stones were found in many parts of Europe, but were especially common in Malta. Various traditions likened them to the tongues of serpents or birds. One tradition said they fell from the moon. Another said they were real tongues of snakes that had been petrified as punishment for annoying a saint. Like unicorn horn, they were thought to be effective in treating a variety of illnesses. Steno was not the first to notice the resemblance. However, he was the first to strongly argue a theory about their origin. Steno categorically rejected the theory that glossopetrae could grow inside solid rock influenced by cosmic or any other forces. He compared them to crystals, which did grow in the earth. Crystal growth could be re-created in the laboratory. Close examination showed that crystals had very simple structures made up of elementary forms repeated. Glossopetrae, however, had complex structures unlike any known type of crystal. His theory reversed the order of events. He argued that the glossopetrae were not objects resembling tongues that somehow formed within rocks, but real shark’s teeth, and that the rock in which they were found had formed around the teeth after the sharks died.
Steno’s idea of stones forming addressed an element of geological time that was not yet part of the European intellectual tradition in 1670. In a literal reading of Genesis, the earth was only three days older than Adam, making the idea of earth history as different and separate from human history rather pointless. This did not mean that the world was not unchanging. Recorded history produced accounts of some changes. Volcanoes erupted, earthquakes shook the earth, and rivers ate away at their banks and filled harbors with silt. These changes were trivial compared to the two great events that formed the basic shape of the world: Creation and the Deluge. Many writers before Steno had commented on the stratification of stone and soil on the earth. Understanding them was simple: they were laid down as sediment during the two formative events. Steno had no problem with this idea until, one day in Tuscany, he realized that some strata were tilted at angles that sedimentation could not produce. His solution to this problem was ingenious. He envisioned one set of strata being laid down, followed by a period of subterranean waters washing away the lower layers until the upper layers collapsed, creating the angled strata that puzzled him. In time, new strata were laid over the angled strata in places, eventually undermined, and collapsed, creating the complex structures he saw in Tuscany. It was during periods of new strata being laid down that glossopetrae were deposited in fresh mud before it hardened into rock. Steno did not explicitly state that this progressive creation of the landscape could take much more time than the traditional biblical chronology, but others would not avoid it.
Tentzel went to great lengths to advertise the Tonna discovery and gather support for his position. Soon after writing his letter to Magliabechi, he had it published as a pamphlet in Latin and sent copies to various other influential thinkers and scientific societies. A few months later, he published an edition of the letter in German. At the end of the year, he printed a second edition of the Latin version. These were generally well received. Abridged versions were published in the Italian Giornale de’Letterati, the French Journal des sçavans, and the German Acta Eruditorum. In London, the Royal Society published the entire Latin version of the pamphlet in their Philosophical Transactions. Unlike Grand Duke Ferdinando, Duke Frederick allowed his librarian to give away several of the bones themselves to make his case. Soon after their discovery, Frederick allowed the bones to be shown at the spring fair in Leipzig, where Tentzel showed them to several traveling scholars. Frederick may have had his own motives for giving his librarian such free rein. Besides wanting to be known as a patron of the sciences, he had just two months before the discovery been awarded the highly prestigious Order of the Elephant by the king of Denmark. It didn’t hurt to remind people of this fact by having his name associated with elephants. Tentzel wrote a follow-up pi
ece in the January 1697 issue of his Monatliche, telling his subscribers about the support he had received and other accounts of buried elephant bones that had been brought to his attention. Here he mentions the account in Witsen’s shipbuilding book account of elephant ivory discovered in Mexico and Siberia, using Witsen’s name for the latter: Mammotekoos. He follows this with a direct quote from Ludolph’s grammar, published the previous year, calling the ivory Mammotovoi kost. The support that Tentzel received from other scholars did not cause Schnetter and the doctors to gave up on the debate. The medical college published at least four more pamphlets defending their position over the next year. Presumably Schnetter was the anonymous author of all four. Tentzel answered each in due course, but neither side said anything new in these pamphlets.
After Magliabechi, Tentzel was most eager to get the approval of the Royal Society. The Royal Society (officially the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge) was the first of the scientific societies and academies that began to appear in the middle of the seventeenth century. These societies began as informal salons of curious men near centers of learning and rapidly began to gain official, state-sanctioned status beginning in the 1660s. The Royal Society began at Gresham College in London in 1662, the Académie des sciences in Paris in 1666, and the Swedish Royal Society of Sciences at Uppsala University outside Stockholm in 1710. As Russia had very few native scientists, Peter the Great recruited some from Western Europe to move to St. Petersburg and create the Russian Imperial Academy in 1724. Other groups appeared in the Italian and German states. Parallel to the rise of the societies was the rise of academic journals. The Giornale de’Letterati, founded in Rome in 1668, included studies of antiquities and church history along with reports on scientific advances. The French Journal des sçavans, whose first issue came out in January 1665, specialized in book reviews and obituaries. Prior to the 1660s, the only forms of scientific writing had been letters, books, and casual notices in popular gazettes. The journals making their debut by the middle of the century were different in that they drew more directly from the researchers themselves. The topics that each journal covered were defined by the interests of the members of the group and limited by the local church and royal censors. Some journals contained articles about history, philosophy, and (rarely) theology. Others leaned almost exclusively toward the sciences. As this was the pioneering era of the academic journal, the styles and formats varied wildly and only remotely resembled their modern descendants. The most common contents were the minutes of presentations at the meetings of their parent organizations, letters from corresponding members, and reviews of books. At first, the reviews were the most important. Some reviews were simple summaries of works. Others were long enough to qualify as plagiarism under later laws. The most valuable were critical essays akin to the best modern reviews. These early journals expanded on the Republic of Letters, but did not replace it. Letters remained important because they were less subject to censorship than published documents. As far as reviews were concerned, journals allowed a much bigger audience to become aware of interesting works and seek them out. It was the pursuit of a specific audience that led Tentzel to seek out the Royal Society.
Discovering the Mammoth Page 14
