82 Facts relMing to Diluvian Action. 



raised and increased very much by the Dehige, and the moun- 

 tains and ridges were lowered, and robbed of their loose stones, 

 by the same cause. The opening of about fifty miles wide 

 through this part of the Alleghany ridge, has probably tended, 

 in some measure, to control and direct the course of the cur- 

 rent of water. The mastodon appears not to have been a na- 

 tive of this section of the country, but was probably an inhabi- 

 tant of the champaign countries to the west, and the bodies may 

 have been borne, on this mighty current, through falls and ca- 

 taracts, to the low, basin-like counties of Ulster and Orange, 

 where they were finally deposited. Before the Deluge, the 

 counties of Orange and Ulster were probably formed of low 

 sharp ridges of greywacke and limestone, and narrow short val- 

 leys running in different directions, with little or scarcely any soil 

 or earth either in the valleys or on the low sharp ridges, and of 

 course such countries would not be the natural residence of the 

 unwieldy mastodon. The carcasses of these animals were pro- 

 bably in some cases brought whole, in others they were lace- 

 rated and torn asunder, or bruised, and the bones broken, be- 

 fore the flesh had decayed and dropped from them. This ap- 

 pears from the place and the condition in which the bones are 

 found. The first skeleton found in Orange, was taken out of a 

 swamp near Crawford, on the Newburgh Turnpike. This car- 

 cass was deposited entire and unbroken in a pond or basin of 

 water, and after the flesh was decayed from the bones, they 

 were spread over an area of about thirty feet square ; the outlet 

 of this pond is a firm rock ; the pond has been filled up by de- 

 cayed vegetable substances, and now forms a swamp of about 

 ten acres, covered with maple and black ash. In the north part 

 of this swamp, about two years ago, on digging a deep ditch to 

 drain the ground, a skeleton of the mammoth was found ; this 

 skeleton I immediately examined very minutely, and found that 

 the carcass had been deposited whole, but that the jaw-bone, 

 two of the ribs, and a thigh-bone, had been broken by some vio- 

 lent force, while the carcass was whole ; on taking up the bones 

 this was evident from every circumstance. Two other parts of 

 skeletons were, some years since, disinterred, one near Ward's 

 Bridge, and the other at Masten's Meadow, in Shongham ; in 

 both instances the carcasses had been torn asunder, and the bones 



