Breyne's letter on mammoth bones from Siberia

Johann Philipp Breyne, a naturalist of Danzig, wrote to Sir Hans Sloane of the Royal Society about mammoth's bones dug up in Siberia. He worked from specimens he could examine and from reports by field observers, among them Daniel Messerschmidt, the German naturalist who explored Siberia for Peter the Great in the 1720s. The card says the letter argues for a universal deluge as the explanation. The text dates the letter to 1735, though the archive dates the item to 1753. The atlas holds a stored copy of this text, but a keyword search of it found no passages mentioning Tartars, so nothing from it was read for this guide.

How they knew

Part eyewitness

Who “Tartar” means here

Not recorded on the card. The bones come from Siberia, which English writers of the time often called Russian or Asiatic Tartary, so the word may refer to the region or its peoples. The card does not say.

Why read it

It shows how an eighteenth-century naturalist read buried bones and used the biblical Flood to explain them, an early example of deluge explanations for finds in the ground.

Watch out

The archive date (1753) and the date in the letter (1735) disagree, so the original journal issue needs checking. The card stresses that the bone observations and the Flood explanation are separate claims.