23 



but lie upon it, inclosed either in more recent swampy deposits 

 or in the nearly as recent, later, local diluvial clays and gravels 

 of the great lake and river valleys of the country. But the fact 

 that the bones and teeth of the extinct Elephant on this conti- 

 nent are entombed in the same superficial materials, seems not 

 to have been sufficiently adverted to by geologists, or, if pass- 

 ingly stated, its bearings have been overlooked. 



That the American Elephant was the contemporary of the 

 Mastodon giganteus, is not only proved by the occurrence of 

 great numbers of their teeth and bones, side by side, in the 

 marshy alluvium of Big Bone Lick, but is manifest, on a scru- 

 tiny of the conditions under which its remains are alleged to be 

 imbedded. A careful review of all the cases on record of the 

 positions of the Elephant remains, must satisfy geologists, fami- 

 liar with the more recent strata of this country, that these two 

 colossal animals lived together in the long period of surface tran- 

 quillity which succeeded the strewing of the general drift, (the 

 period of the Laurentian clays,) and were overtaken and exter- 

 minated together by the same changes, partly of climate, partly 

 of a second but more local displacement of the waters ; that 

 namely which reshifted the Drift, and formed our later lake and 

 river terraces. The fact, that these extinct animals thus occur 

 only above the true drift in North America, and in it in Siberia 

 and Europe, would seem to indicate one of two things : either 

 that the Drifts of the two continents are not of the same epoch, 

 or these being of one age, that the fossil Elephants of the two re- 

 gions are not of one and the same species. If we admit, with 

 the great body of geologists, that the general Drift covering of 

 all the northern latitudes of both continents is of one origin and 

 one date, we are constrained to regard the Mammoths of these 

 respective lands as different. Yet the identity of date of the two 

 Drift formations should not be dogmatically pronounced upon in 

 the present incomplete condition of comparative geology. 



Prof. Rogers exhibited maps of the Arctic discoveries in 

 the years 1850 and 1851, and explained why Albert Land, 

 of the English charts, should be justly called Grinnell Land, 

 the name given to it by Lieut. I)e Haven, its discoverer. 



