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Mr Venning gave Borrow letters of introduction to a number of influential personages at St Petersburg, including Prince Alexander Galitzin and Baron Schilling de Canstadt. Dr Bowring obtained a letter from Lord Palmerston to someone whose name is not known.
At Canstadt near Stuttgart, loess resembling that of the Rhine contains many fossil bones, especially those of Elephas primigenius, together with some of Rhinoceros tichorhinus, the species having been lately determined by Dr. Falconer. At this place the loess is covered by a thick bed of travertine, used as a building stone, the product of a mineral spring.
Wm. Swann, of the London Missionary Society, discovered in the famous library of Baron Schilling de Canstadt at St Petersburg the manuscript of a Manchu translation of "the principal part of the Old Testament," and two books of the New. The discovery was considered to be so important that Mr Swann decided to delay his departure for his post in Siberia and make a transcription, which he did.
One of Borrow's earliest thoughts on arriving at St Petersburg had been to present his letters of introduction. One of the most important, and at the same time useful, friendships that he made was with Baron Schilling de Canstadt, the philologist and savant, who, later, with his accustomed generosity, was to place his unique library at Borrow's disposition.
The bones were those of short, squat individuals, and the skulls were of the type of the Canstadt race, the most ancient of which anything is known; the thickness of the crania was about one third of an inch. The forehead, is low and retreating, the eyebrows are prominent, and the lower jaws strong and well developed.
Below the loess of Canstadt, in which bones of the mammoth are so abundant, is a bed of gravel evidently an old river channel now many feet above the level of the Neckar, the valley having there been excavated to some depth below its ancient channel so as to lie in the underlying red sandstone of Keuper.
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