The Royal Society did not have a journal when it was chartered. The decision to publish one came three years later when the fellows asked the society’s secretary, Henry Oldenburg, to edit and print a monthly account of the society’s communications. Oldenburg was allowed to keep any profits from the venture as a form of payment for his troubles. The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society began as sixteen pages of short notices. The first issue has a one-paragraph description of a spot in Jupiter’s atmosphere reported by Giovanni Cassini and a number of notices from Robert Boyle concerning topics as diverse as lead ore in Germany, whaling off Bermuda, and “An Account of a Very Odd Monstrous Calf.” By the seventh issue, there was the first account of fossils, some petrified wood, and perhaps a bone. For the first year, the Philosophical Transactions consisted mostly of short excerpts from letters to Oldenburg. This began to change during the second year as he began to include longer pieces describing experiments and observations of nature done by society members and their correspondents. The emphasis on experiments and observations soon gained the Transactions a reputation for rigor and a place of prestige among journals. Despite the fact that most pieces in the journal were in English—a language few continentials spoke—publication in the Transactions was considered a very desirable sign of approval. Each issue of Journal des sçavans usually included a summary of one or more articles from the Transactions.
Although the Transactions published his pamphlet in full, Tentzel was disappointed with the society’s response. He had hoped for some discussion or commentary among the members or private discussions through letters. Instead, it was published with a short note saying the bones and ivory he sent agreed with his description and that they had been placed in the society’s repository. He wrote to John Ray, a fellow of the society, several times and even sent him some bones, but never received the kind of engagement he hoped for. Despite their silence, the members of the society remembered his pamphlet and bones and would refer to them whenever they discussed elephantine bones for the next several decades.
As these societies and journals grew in prominence and influence into the eighteenth century, another German discovery, less than five years after the Tonna bones, garnered attention due to the sheer magnitude of the find. In late April 1700, a soldier doing guard duty outside Cannstatt in Württemberg noticed some ivory protruding from the ground near an ancient wall. There are no descriptions of the discovery that match the detail of Tentzel’s, but the duke’s personal physician, Solomon Reisel, did write a short letter covering most of the pertinent details. Duke Eberhard Ludwig was not particularly interested in affairs of state, preferring affairs with his mistress. Luckily for us, he was another enthusiastic collector. The excavations he ordered lasted a full six months. During that time, an enormous amount of bone and ivory was uncovered. In some places, they were packed so tightly that the workers had to blast them loose. By the time the digging stopped, they had recovered sixty tusks, mostly in pieces, and the bones of bears, wolves, cattle, various small animals, and many mice. The inclusion of the last suggests that while the excavation was violent at times, it was very thorough. The duke picked out several nice bones, teeth, and pieces of ivory for his collection. The rest he gave to the apothecaries in Stuttgart to grind up and sell as unicorn horn.
Reisel and David Spleiss, a doctor from Schaffhousen, Switzerland, who also wrote about the bones, were of the opinion that the ruined walls were the last vestiges of an old pagan temple. The bones, they believed, were the remains of sacrifices conducted there. Roman artifacts had been found in higher strata nearby. Reisel was unsure whether the largest—mammoth—bones were real and not sports of nature. Spleiss had no doubt that they were the bones and tusks of elephants. Like Tentzel, who he cites, he closely examined the bones and was certain that no mineral process could mimic the internal structure of real bones. His theory was that the Romans had made an unrecorded military expedition into that part of Germany using war elephants and had been defeated. The victorious pagan Germans had then sacrificed the captured elephants to their gods. Reisel was a correspondent of the Royal Society. No notice of the discovery appeared in the Transactions at the time, but the members knew of it and mentioned it along with Tenzel’s elephant it in later years.
The first papers published in the Transactions to deal with the problem of these massive bones were by Thomas Molyneux, one of a pair of scientifically minded brothers. The older of the two, William, was one of the founders of the Dublin Philosophical Society and both were made fellows of the Royal Society in the 1680s. His first comments were two letters written over the winter of 1684–1685. These “Concern[ed] a Prodigious Os Frontis in the Medicine School at Leyden.” He writes that this forehead bone is twice the size of a normal one and must have come from a man eleven or twelve feet high. No one at the medical school knew where it came from. In a much longer article written in 1700, he makes clear that he believes this is merely the bone of an unusually tall man, nearing the maximum tallest possible for a human, and not a giant in the mythical sense. Molyneux’s interest in large bones was not limited to human-looking bones. In 1697, he wrote about giant antlers often found in Ireland that resembled those of the American moose. From the illustration, we can tell he was looking at the skull and antlers of the extinct Irish elk. He uses the word “extinct” to describe their absence from Ireland but, since he goes on to conclude that it is the same animal as the moose, it’s clear he only means it in the regional sense. As possible reasons for its disappearance, he suggests an epidemic or overhunting by the early Irish. He specifically excludes the Deluge as a possible cause, saying that the horns would have been broken if they had been buffeted around by the flood waters, and, in any case, the flood was too long ago (over four thousand years by his reckoning) for the horns to have survived. As to how the animal once populated both Ireland and the New World, he says the only possibility is that the two must have once been connected.
Molyneux returned to the topic of giant bones in 1715. In July that year, Francis Nevile wrote a letter to the bishop of Clogher telling of the discovery of four enormous teeth during the construction of a mill in Northern Ireland. Nevile is of the opinion that, if they are those of an elephant, they must have been carried there by the Deluge, because no one in earlier ages could have had reason to bring an elephant to Ireland. Molyneux saw the letter and convinced the owner of the teeth to send them to him to examine. He had high-quality drawings made and wrote up the results of his examination for the society. He had no trouble identifying them as elephantine. To make his case he made liberal use of two published elephant autopsies, Mullen’s and another by Patrick Blair of an elephant that had died in Dundee, Scotland, in 1706. Blair’s autopsy was particularly detailed and filled two complete issues of the Transactions in 1710. Satisfied that he has established that they are elephant’s teeth, Molyneux goes on to discuss how they got there. Once again, he rejects the Deluge and, referring to his earlier discussion of moose in Ireland, says that the “Distribution of the Ocean and Dry-land [of the earth] its Islands, Continents and Shores” must have once been different enough to allow elephants easy passage to Ireland. To bolster this argument, he refers to accounts of elephant teeth found in England and to Tentzel’s account of the Tonna elephant. Finally, he mentions Ides’s account of mammoth remains in Siberia. After Tentzel and Witsen, Molyneux is only the third writer to explicitly make the connection between elephant bones found in Europe and mammoth bones found in Siberia. The society published both letters and the drawings along with comments of their own (probably written by the secretary, Sir Edmund Halley, of comet fame). Sir Hans Sloane brought elephant’s teeth from his collection for comparison, and several members made a field trip to Westminster to examine a complete elephant’s skull held there. This satisfied everyone that the Irish teeth came from a young elephant, about half the size of the Westminster one.
Access to Sloane’s collection, which was becoming recognized as the greatest natura
l history collection in Britain, was a useful asset in making the identification. Sloane was born in Ireland in 1660 and began collecting curiosities as boy. He studied medicine in London and France, collecting plants the whole time, and was well enough known that he was elected a fellow of the society soon after graduating. In 1687, he sailed to Jamaica as the personal physician to the new governor, the duke of Albemarle. The duke died after only fifteen months (through no fault of Sloane’s). When Sloane returned with the duke’s body, he had amassed a collection of eight hundred plants, mostly unknown in Britain, and scores of insects, artifacts, and other objects that caught his eye. He also brought back his own recipe for a healthful tonic made of cacao, sugar, and warm milk. In 1693, he became the secretary of the society and, therefore, the editor of the Transactions. In this capacity, he would have been the one who received Tentzel’s pamphlet and the bones he sent. After marrying a rich widow and marketing his chocolate beverage, Sloane was able to acquire entire collections from other collectors, greatly increasing the size of his own. In 1722, John Bell passed through London following his diplomatic mission to China on behalf of Peter the Great. He brought with him a modest-sized but complete mammoth tusk, which he presented to Sloane. According to Sloane, Bell received the tusk from the wife of the governor of Siberia “in Lieu of a Reward for having cured her of a Distemper.”
When Sir Isaac Newton died on March 20, 1727, Sloane was elected to take his place as the president of the Royal Society. Later that year, the Transactions published two papers he had written on the topic of buried ivory. These made up the most comprehensive survey on the topic up to that time and for a good time after. In the first of these, titled “An Account of Elephants Teeth and Bones found under Ground,” Sloane describes the tusks in his own carefully cataloged collection. For each he gives a physical description, an account of its discovery, and other facts he thinks might be relevant. Following the paper are seven drawings of the tusks. His discussion of number 117 in his collection includes an essay on some historical discoveries, including Boccaccio’s Sicilian giant and Tentzel’s elephant. Number 1185 is the mammoth tusk Bell brought back from Siberia. It is in the context of describing Bell’s tusk that he first brings up the word “mammoth.” His discussion of mammoths takes up almost half of the paper. He liberally quotes or paraphrases Ludolf, Ides, Müller, and Tatishchev, along with the secretary on Bell’s diplomatic mission, Lorenz Lange, and Cornelius de Bruyn, who had been with Peter the Great when he was shown the bones that he credited to Alexander’s armies. In mentioning each author, he quotes their spelling or form of the word “mammoth.” When he discusses the mysterious beast on his own he uses the form “Maman,” which comes from Müller. His account of Bell acquiring the tusk would be the only published version of that discovery until Bell published his journals twenty-six years later.
The next issue of the Transactions contained the concluding part of Sloane’s survey: “Of Fossile Teeth and Bones of Elephants. Part the Second.” In this part, he leaves his collection and other bones that were available for him to personally examine and moves on to “several antient and modern Authors” who saw “Skeletons and Parts of Skeletons which are shewn up and down as undeniable Monuments of the Existence of Giants.” Before diving into this topic, he digresses for a moment to compare the vertebrae of a whale and an elephant, showing how they should not be mistaken for a human’s. With Mullen’s and especially Blair’s anatomies available, Sloane was confident he could recognize elephant bones when presented with them. What the educated world needed now was comparative anatomies of different species and categories of animals. Returning from his digression, he begins listing some giants’ bones in literature, starting with the ancient authors, working his way through Boccacio’s and Kircher’s comments about them, and finally arriving at more recent times. He avoids the easy path of making a blanket declaration that everything is an elephant and looks for those accounts where the authors gave enough details, such as the size of a tooth or the dimensions of a skull, that he could identify elephantine features. Even without significant details, the presence of ivory always means “elephant” to Sloane. Among the ancients and church fathers, only St. Augustine’s tooth meets his standards as being recognizably an elephant’s. On arriving in more recent times, he feels confident in naming most reported giants as being elephant’s remains.
He specifically mentions the Krems giant and Tentzel’s elephant along with other recent discoveries in Italy, Germany, Poland, Greece, and Hungary. From the last country, Count Luigi Marsigli had brought back bones and ivory from several elephants (his collection later became the property of the Scientific Academy of Bologna, which he founded). Marsigli thought these were the remains of Roman war elephants. Sloane refers to the arguments of Tentzel—that Romans wouldn’t have abandoned the ivory and that the undisturbed strata above them meant that they couldn’t have been buried by humans—to decide against that interpretation.
In neither paper did Sloane have anything particularly new to add to what was already known about buried elephants and mammoths, namely that they were real organic remains. He added descriptions of his own collected pieces and Bell’s account of how his tusk was found, but these were additional evidence of things already known. Nevertheless, the importance of the two papers is threefold. First was bringing all of this information together, which was an act that shouldn’t be underestimated. Sloane’s survey was, by far, the most complete done on the subject and would remain so for almost forty years. Second was decisively linking the mysteries of elephant bones in Europe and mammoth bones in Siberia together and calling it one unified question. What were these bones and how did they get to their far-flung locations? Third was the fact that this was all being done by Hans Sloane himself. At this point in his life, he had enormous credibility among Europe’s intellectual elite. For twenty years, he had been the secretary for the society, a position that made corresponding with the greatest minds in Europe a duty. The extent and quality of his natural history collection was well known—later it would be the basis for the British Museum. When he said the elephant and mammoth questions were one and the same, his opinion had a weight that couldn’t be dismissed. Typical of his present-the-facts-and-stand-back attitude was how he dealt with the question of how these elephants and mammoths came to buried where they were found. Using Tentzel’s argument, he pointed out that human agency could not explain the best-documented discoveries, and he agreed that the Deluge was the best solution available. But that agreement didn’t equal support. He allowed that other solutions might exist. After summarizing Tatishchev’s paper, he added a plea for more information:
It is to be hoped, that this Matter will one Time or other be set to a still clearer Light, particularly after the Order of his late Czarish Majesty was pleased to give to the Governor General of Siberia, to spare no Care nor Cost to find a whole Skeleton of this Animal.
Over in Russia, Peter the Great was impressed by the academies he met with during his two trips to the West. He added the creation of one, along with its own journal, to the long list of things he needed for a fully modernized country. Two problems stood in his way: a lack of educated Russians and the fact that most of the budget was going directly or indirectly to the military. For a time, the second of these slightly alleviated the first. The experts he hired to help with his military build-up educated a cohort of Russians in technical skills, mathematics, and basic literacy (though usually in Dutch or German). Following his first trip he corresponded with Leibniz about education, and although he didn’t adopt his recommendations, it led him to experiment. Trying to build on the existing system of church schools was a failure due to the hostility to secular knowledge among church officials and the fact that none of the teachers knew much beyond how to train clergy. Once the war began he allowed POWs to teach some noble boys and even invited German missionaries to set up schools, but again the results were meager. After Poltava, he encouraged scores of Swedish officers to explore the east
, but he must have known most of them would leave once the war was over. Sometime before his second trip to the West, knowing that the war was winding down, he began to seriously make plans for a university and academy after the war. Knowing that this was a few years in the future and being the impatient man he was, Peter hired a small number of experts to make more formal expeditions than the POWs were making. Most of these trips were planned by his doctor, Robert Erskine.
Discovering the Mammoth Page 15
