Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
great flood, in much the way remains of African elephants were thought to have made it to
Europe.
Similar finds in North America were also attributed to Noah's Flood. Large bones found
along the banks of the Hudson River in upstate New York were thought to be those of
an antediluvian giant. Discovered eroding from a hillside in 1705 near Albany, a six-inch-
tall, two-and-a-quarter-pound tooth and a seventeen-foot-long thighbone convinced Cotton
Mather, of Salem witch trial fame, that giants really did drown in the Flood. Dug out from
the base of the hill, the great thighbone crumbled away when exposed to the air. Mather
was convinced that the more durable four-pronged tooth looked like a human molar, only
much bigger. All who saw it thought that this was a victim of Noah's Flood. Based on the
size of such bones, one authority estimated that Adam was well over a hundred feet tall.
Mather's giant bone, however, was probably a mammoth bone.
Mather was enthralled with his fossil finds, and in November 1712, he wrote the first of
a series of letters to the Royal Society in London to bring to the attention of scholars these
New World curiosities from the time of the Flood. He also reported accounts of giant bones
discovered in South America, convinced that they, too, were proof of Noah's Flood.
Below the Strata of Earth, which the Flood left on the Surface of it, in the other Hemisphere, such Enormous Bones
have been found, as all Skill in Anatomy, must pronounce to belong unto Humane Bodies, and could belong to none
but GIANTS… . The Giants that once Groaned under the waters, are now found under the Earth, and their Dead
Bones are Lively Proofs of the Mosaic History.
2
The flood that buried giants appeared universal in Mather's mind and fit in well with his
belief that Moses described Noah's Flood as a global event. In 1721, Mather wrote
The
Christian Philosopher
, the first systematic topic on science published in America. Invok-
ing fossils as direct evidence of a global flood, it was dedicated to the argument that reason
supported faith.
Not everyone was convinced that giant bones were the bones of giants. Around 1725,
English botanist Mark Catesby visited Stono, a large plantation near Charleston, South
Carolina, to examine gigantic teeth that slaves had unearthed from a swamp. While the
plantation owners thought that the colossal molars were the remains of a giant that drowned
in the Flood, the native Africans who had found them swore that they were dead ringers
