252 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERT. 



certain that the buffalo was not in the Mississippi valley at the 

 time of the mound builders. That people have preserved in their 

 pottery work, or in the remains foinid around tlieir sacrificial and 

 luual fires, the ima<]jes, or the bones, of all tlie other laro^e animals 

 which were found there at the tune of the coming of civilized man. 

 Nearly every mammal with which tliey could possibly have come 

 in contact is represented. Even the manitre, which they could 

 have known only by rejDort, is very often figured by them upon 

 their pipes and other utensils. It is hardly iK)ssil)le that the 

 buffalo could have failed to be represented, if they had ever come 

 in contact with it. 



The common deer (^Ceri'us Yirginianns) seems, also, to have fre- 

 quented tiicse springs for only a few hundred years before the 

 coming of man. It probably came some time before the buffalo, 

 though its remains, also, are never found at such depths as would 

 warrant one in supj)osing that it liad been more than twice as 

 long as the buffiilo in the Ohio valley. 



Beneath the levels where the rem:iins of the Virginia deer and the 

 buffalo abound were found numerous fragments of the horns of the 

 caribou ( Tarandas rargifer) . This animal has not been found south 

 of the State of Maine or the great lakes since the discovery of 

 this country. The position of these remains indicates that it ap- 

 peared in the Ohio Vi,lley immediately after tlie disappearance of 

 the Elephas fumegerens, or mammoth. It seems, indeed, not 

 improbable that they may have coexisted for a short time. The 

 existence of a boreal species of mammal in this region at the time 

 of the disappearance of the elephants makes it seem very proba- 

 ble that the climate, during the elephant period in this region, 

 was much colder than is generally supposed, and that the change 

 of temperature which accompanied, if it did noi i)roduee, the ex- 

 tinction of the fauna in which these animals belonged was more 

 likely from cold to warm than from warm to cold. The fact that 

 the representative of our American mammoth in Northern Eu- 

 rope and Asia was an animal as well fittcnl to withstand excessive 

 cold as the i)olar bear, shows how unsafe it is to infer for animals 

 of former ages the climatic restrictions which affect their living 

 relatives. 



THE TREND OF THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 



Professor W. H. Dall read a paper at the meeting of the Ameri- 

 can Association, at Salem, "On the Trend of the llocky Mountain 

 Range, north latitude G0°, and its Influence on Faunal Distribu- 

 tion.'' 



The paper stated that the Rocky Mountain range, between lati- 

 tudes 60° and 04°, bends trending with the eastern coast; so that, 

 instead of there being, as represented on the old maps, a straight 

 line of mountains up to the Arctic Sea, there is an elevated i)la- 

 teau, only broken occasionall}' by a very few ranges of hills. 

 This bend of the mountains prevented the characteristic birds of 

 the west Cf)ast from coming north, while the eastern birds came 

 clear to Behring's Sea, north of it, over the plateau. He also 



