320 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



company with those of the buffalo. As for the circumstance of no pic- 

 tures of Mastodons having been found on Indian robes or tents, he was 

 inclined to attach little importance to it, as such memorials were very 

 perishable. He alluded to the frequent occurrence, among the ruined 

 cities of Yucatan, of monstrous heads, each furnished with a proboscis, 

 sometimes pendant and sometimes turned up, which it was not impos- 

 sible might have been intended to represent the heads of Mastodons. 



In a discussion which took place at the American Association, Cin- 

 cinnati, on the question whether the American Mastodon existed 

 before or after the drift period, Major Owen said that he could bring 

 forward one fact, from personal observation, which might throw some 

 light on the subject. At the Blue Lick Springs he had obtained some 

 remains of the Mastodon, found near the tusk, nine feet long, which 

 had been sent to Peale's Museum, in Philadelphia. He had searched 

 diligently in the black bog earth, in which the animals had evidently 

 been swamped, while crowding to the brine springs, (from which, up 

 to the present day, salt can be made,) but had found no shells to 

 characterize the epoch. Fourteen miles, however, from that place, 

 while searching for gigantic mammalian remains in yellow clay, (from 

 the abrupt bank of which, after heavy rains, bones were frequently 

 seen to project,) he found no bones, but found an ambonychia, imbed- 

 ded fifteen or twenty feet below the surface. This, on examination, 

 seemed to be identical with the ambonychia amygdaUna, described by 

 Prof. Hall, in his " Paleontology of New York." It had consequently 

 been derived from the adjoining limestone or Silurian formation, either 

 by agencies which had detached it from the limestone and carried it 

 to the clay, or by having the loam of the drift, or a yet later period, 

 wash down into the mammalian remains, bringing with it the debris 

 and fossils of the surrounding Silurian rocks. From the same locality 

 he obtained, a few weeks afterwards, a grinder of the Eliphas primo- 

 genius, or mammoth. 



In other localities, where no such disturbance had taken place, the 

 imbedded shells, accompanying similar remains, had been pronounced 

 by Lyell, on his late visit to the United States, as showing the loam 

 bluffs of the West and South to be contemporaneous ivith the drift ; 

 whereas, in Canada and New Y'ork. some lacustrine and swamp 

 deposits of marl and bog earth, including the bones of extinct quad- 

 rupeds, were decidedly post-glacial. 



MASTODON ANGUSTIDENS. 



AT a recent meeting of the Boston Natural History Society, Dr. 

 Warren, the President, exhibited a cast of a Mastodon's tooth, an allu- 

 sion to which he had happened to meet with some years since. It had 

 been dug up from the banks of a stream about twelve miles distant from 

 Baltimore, under the direction of Dr. Ducatel, State Surveyor. After 

 having possessed it a considerable time, Dr. D. showed it to Mr. 

 Charles worth, who judged it to have belonged to Mastodon Longiros- 

 tris. Sir Charles Lyell having seen it, was disposed to believe it to be 

 a tooth of M. Angustidens. and in this opinion concurred Drs. Hays 



