444 PROCEEDINGS OF THE ACADEMY OF [1895. 



stratification and it was the great number and variety of the bones of 

 animals that protruded from it in all directions that first astonished 

 him. The bones lay in the red clay and black earth with fragments 

 of limestone and bits of shale, broken, crushed, ground into a sort of 

 meal, or flattened by the down-settling of the earth, often ooziug full 

 of water like a soaked sponge, and falling to pieces when touched, 

 so that they had to be cased in shells of plaster of paris, to be 

 removed. All that was seen was scattered and dislocated; no skele- 

 ton lay together, nor had the marks of gnawing teeth been found 

 upon any of the bones to indicate a den of carnivorous beasts, while 

 the kind and proportion of the remains further dispel the latter idea. 

 The country, which for this reason they might infer was thickly 

 wooded, must have been thickly inhabited by sloths, judging from the 

 astonishing number of their bones, and as inferentially from modern 

 species neither this animal nor the tapir, buried with it, endured 

 cold, the climate was probably warm or temperate. Animals large 

 and small, fierce and gentle, lay together, the cumbrous mastodon 

 whose bones had been ground to powder, or dislocated and crushed, 

 at the bottom of the digging along with the rabbit and the turtle. 

 Professor Cope had shown that there were feline carnivores and 

 abundant bears, and they had found the saber- toothed tiger with the 

 bones of birds and the remains of the gentler horse, the beaver, and 

 the llama. What was the power that destroyed the creatures, and 

 what the event that brought toegther their bones and buried them 

 in one place? 



Not to anticipate a description that ought to be very carefully 

 given of the position and contents of this remarkable deposit, of the 

 way the jaws and the teeth, the knuckles and the vertebras of these 

 inhabitants of land and water, earth and air lay together, of the 

 relation of all the bones to the stratified bands of clay and stones, and 

 of the position of the whole with reference to the surface of the hill, 

 and to the other galleries and chambers that had been continually 

 revealed by blasting, let it be said, that every blow of the pick-axe, 

 destroying as much as it saved in the thick mass, revealed the 

 action of water, which, it seems, must have overswept the hill- top 

 since it could not have crept up to do its work by seeking its level 

 through a longer ingress, and which, for other reasons to be explained, 

 must have worked upon a large scale. Was it an immense rising of 

 the river swollen by the down- washing from the glacier? Was it a 

 wider sinking of the whole eastern continental floor when the sea 

 invaded the land during the Champlain period ? If so, where were 

 the marine shells, which thus far the speaker had failed to find? Was 

 it a gradual thing or a sudden and terrible catastropbe, driving to- 

 gether beasts forgetful for the time of their animosities, toward some 

 common refuge. He might refer the carbonizing of the wood to vege- 

 table decomposition; should he appeal to the action of ice to account 



