96 



where they had been thrown by the negroes when the land was 

 cleared for cultivation. He also procured others of the bones in 

 Clark county, at a place twenty miles distant, and some wagon- 

 loads of them at another place seven miles distant from the spot 

 where he got the most interesting part of them. 



Dr. Lister was not present at the actual exhumation of the 

 bones ; but, on the invitation of Dr. Koch, he examined them at 

 the Court House, and saw enough to convince him that Dr. Koch 

 could have made his skeleton three hundred feet long, as easily 

 as one hundred and fourteen feet. 



Dr. Lister adds that the people of his neighborhood had been 

 very much amused by the accounts of the wonderful animal 

 which had appeared in the New York newspapers, and by the 

 various opinions which had been pronounced upon it by learned 

 gentlemen. 



A letter, addressed to the President by Mr. John Barllett, 

 now engaged in a zoological exploration in the south-western 

 States, dated Natchez, January 10, 1846, was read. 



Mr. Bartlett said that he had received authentic information 

 that the bones of Zeuglodon are found near Natchez, in a blue 

 clay of the tertiary beds. He had seen, in the possession of C. 

 G. Forshey, Esq., of Vidalia, La., vertebras of the same animal, 

 procured from a stratum of marl, among the older tertiary beds 

 of Ouachita Bluff, eighty feet above the level of Ouachita River. 

 The shells associated with them, at the last-mentioned locality, 

 are, Ostrea, Peclen, Isocardia, FissureUa, and Dentalium. This 

 observation seems to confirm the original opinion of Dr. Harlan, 

 that the Zeuglodon belonged to the tertiary era, an opinion that 

 has been latterly superseded by the belief that its remains were 

 derived from the cretaceous strata. It is probable that its sup- 

 posed position in the latter, rather than its zoological affinities, 

 led Dr. Harlan to consider it to be a saurian, and not a cetacean, 

 as it is now acknowledged to be. 



Dr. N. B. ShurtlefF informed the Society that the splendid 

 and most valuable skeleton of Mastodon giganteum, ex- 

 humed in August, 1845, from a marl-pit, six miles west of 

 Newburg, Orange county, New York, had arrived in the 



