88 THE FOSSIL SLOTH AT BIG BONE CAVE, TENN". [Jan. 



Found by saltpetre diggers, buried a foot or more below the sur- 

 face in the floor earth of Cromers' cave, Green Briar county. West 

 Virginia, Jefferson's specimens were apparently only a few of a 

 greater series. Col. John Stewart and a Mr. Hopkins, of New- 

 York, saved these here shown. Another bone got to Cuvier in 

 France ; the rest were lost. But from that time to this fragments 

 of the skeleton of the gigantic extinct sloth, claws, limbs, a skull 

 or two, teeth and vertebrae, came to light, sometimes in caves, some- 

 times in alluvial deposits, as the century passed. Several bones were 

 found with mastodon remains mired in the soft saline earth around the 

 springs at Big Bone Lick, Ky.; others in a conglomeration of the 

 bones of extinct animals at Natchez, Miss., where a whole skull was 

 rescued, or in the river alluvium at Memphis, Tenn.; others in White 

 cave, Ky., in Adams county. Miss., and in a cave in northern 

 Alabama, from which a well-preserved series was sent by Mr. Tuomey 

 to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Southern 

 Louisiana must have been well-colonized by the animals whose re- 

 mains, together with the bones of the fossil horse and mastodon, are 

 thickly bedded at the bottom of the rock-salt diggings at Petit 

 Anse, where the creatures probably came to lick salt,^ and the 

 Pennsylvanian forest must have abounded with them from twenty to 

 thirty millenniums ago, judging from the great number of crushed 

 skulls, claws and bones, that I have exhumed from the fossil bone- 

 bearing chasm at Pt. Kennedy along with the sabre-toothed tiger, 

 the mastodon and fossil horse. 



Jefferson, with no tooth to judge by, supposed the ''great 

 claw," as he called it, to be a kind of lion such as Hawkins, Har- 

 riot, Willoughby, Claibourne and other old explorers said they had 

 seen or heard of in the American woods, and he quoted the tales 

 of later Virginian hunters, describing a terrible roaring, and the 

 devouring of a horse, by a great carnivore, which (as in the case of 

 the mammoth) he argued might still exist in the western wilderness 

 then unexplored. But Dr. Caspar Wistar - and then Cuvier estab- 

 lished the analogy of the Cromers' cave bones with the modern 

 sloth of South America. And when no such living carnivore as 

 Jefferson had fancied was ever found, and when the remains discovered 

 later appeared continually in association with extinct animals, the 

 gigantic sloth soon came to be regarded as a characteristic represen- 



1 Joseph F. Joor, M.D., in American N^attifalist ior AprW, 1895. 

 "^Proc. Am. Phllos. Soc, Vol. vi, 526, 1799."] 



