205 



The President exhibited and explained a cast of the 

 Plesiosaurus doUchodeirus, seven feet in length ; he thought 

 it would be more interesting and useful to the Society than 

 to himself, and accordingly presented it to the Society. 



He remarked that the fossil Saurians were comparatively 

 unknown till about the year 1770, at which time the attention 

 of naturalists was arrested by the discovery, near Maestricht, of a 

 supposed new fossil animal ; this specimen established the genus 

 Mososaurus, of which he exhibited plates ; the specimen is still 

 at Paris. Next, Everard Home described another fossil genus 

 of Saurians, to which Charles Koenig, of the British Museum, 

 gave the name of Ichthyosaurus. Then the Plesiosaurus, Proto- 

 saurus, Megahsaurus, &c. were discovered. Of the several 

 genera there are already many species, and these are still in- 

 creasing; there are alread)'- sixteen or seventeen species of Ple- 

 siosaurus. This cast shows the assemblage of parts seemingly 

 of a variety of animals, as the lizard's head, crocodile's teeth, 

 bird's neck, chameleon's ribs, whale's paddles, &;c. He exhib- 

 ited the head of the Icthyosaicrus, showing the arrangement of 

 bones, which gives the spring-like action to the lower jaw. The 

 dorsal vertebrae of the Plesiosaurus resemble those of a fish, but 

 their concavity is less than those of the Icthyosaurus ; the ster- 

 num, shoulder, humerus, and forearm are quite perfect ; the 

 head is imperfect ; unlike the Cetacea, they have a well-formed 

 pelvis ; the lower extremities are well preserved. 



Rev. Zadock Thompson, of Burlington, Vt., exhibited 

 some of the bones of a Cetacean, recently found near Rut- 

 land, on the line of the railroad from Burlington to Bellows 

 Falls. 



The discovery of the remains of Cetacea and Elephants 

 among the Green Mountains is an instance of the great benefit 

 railroads have been to the lovers of science, in bringing to view 

 the earth's strata, and their fossil remains. In 1848, in a deep 

 muck bed on Mount Holly, were found a large tooth, two tusks, 

 and other bones, which have proved to be bones of a fossil ele- 

 phant ; one tusk was seven feet long, so that the animal must 

 have been a large one. In August, 1849, in Charlotte, (a few 



