oou On the Mammoth and the Mastodon, 



race shall be permitted to exist on tliis planet. IS"© merely terres- 

 trial object ever seen by man could possess a thousandth part of 

 the sublime interest that would be excited by this sole survivor in 

 the flesh of a lost world of life. 



The mammoth differs from the elephants of our day only 

 specifically, or as much, perhaps, as the grizzly bear differs from 

 the black bear ; but the mastodon was of another, though closely 

 allied, genus, principally characterized by the form of the molar 

 teeth, which had the grinding surface provided with a number of 

 conical protuberances, while the same surface of the tooth of the 

 mammoth was flat, and crossed by narrow jagged ridges. The 

 mastodon had shorter legs, a longer body, and was more bulky . 

 than the mammoth, although not so tall. It appears that both 

 were larger than the largest Asiatic elephant, none of which 

 exceed 10 feet in height, while a skeleton of ordinary size of the 

 mastodon is 9^ feet. That figured on our plate is 9 feet 7 inches 

 high and 20 feet long, as it stands in the British museum ; and 

 on the same platform. Dr. Mantell says, " there are five bones of 

 the fore-foot nearly twice as large, in linear dimensions, as the 

 corresponding parts of the above skeleton, of Elephas meridionalis, 

 dug up in the brick-fields at Gray's, in Essex." The mammoth 

 figured is 9 feet 4 inches high and 16 feet 4 inches long, without 

 including the tusks, which are 9 feet 6 inches long. 



The bones of these great extinct animals have been found in 

 hundreds of places in the west, but appear to be totally wanting 

 in the eastern part of America. Some of them have been exhumed 

 in Canada within the last few years. In the collection of the 

 Geological Survey at Montreal are two tusks and a portion of the 

 lower jaw of the mammoth discovered at Hamilton in 1851, at 

 Burlington Heights, thirty feet beneath the surface. 



The locality was thus described in a letter we received from 

 Mr. McQueen, editor of the Huron Signal, upon the subject : — 

 " Burlington Heights is a narrow peninsula, about three-fourths 

 of a mile in length, and not more than half a furlong in width, 

 which divides Burlington Bay and the Desjardines Marshes ; an 

 area of several thousand acres lying between the head of the bay 

 and the town of Dundas, four miles distant. The marsh is still 

 partially covered with water, and recent experiments have shown 

 that the bottom is a soft floating mud, extending to a depth of 

 80 feet. Its present surface is scarcely above the waters of the 

 bay. A sluggish stream from the high lan^s crawls down its 



