90 THE AMERICAN BISONS. 
original document, which represents the teeth as occurring in a solid clay 
_ bank, fifteen feet below the surface.* In respect to the character of the 
locality, and its present condition, I have the following additional informa- 
tion from Dr. A. S. Packard, Jr., in answer to special inquiries on this point. 
In a letter dated Salem, Mass., December 31, 1872, Dr. Packard writes: “In 
answer to your other query, I have examined hastily the locality, but many ~ 
years after Lyell visited this country, — about twenty, — and great changes 
may have occurred in the locality, as when I was there the high clay-bank 
was being dug away to supply a brickyard.” + Referring to a suspicion I had 
communicated to him that they would probably prove to be the teeth of a 
domestic ox, he adds further: “The teeth in question may have fallen over 
the embankment, and got mixed up in the beds. The beds containing the 
shells lie below, in a vertical section, where the beds containing the sup- 
posed bison’s teeth would have been, but the shell-bearing beds graduate 
into those situated fifteen feet below the surface.” One of the teeth remain- 
ing in Mrs. Elton’s collection was, at the time I saw it, still firmly imbedded 
in its original matrix of blue clay, of the same character as that enclosing 
the shells. 
From the above it appears that the teeth were not taken from the clay- 
beds by Sir Charles Lyell, as some have supposed, nor by either a geologist 
or a scientific collector; that they could not have been associated with the 
fossil shells, but came from beds considerably above them ; and that it is not 
at all improbable that they rolled down from the surface, and became firmly 
imbedded in the clay. Furthermore, the teeth are in a remarkably perfect 
state of preservation, looking as fresh and recent as a tooth would which 
had had but a short period of exposure to atmospheric or any other de- 
composing influences, having undergone, indeed, scarcely any perceptible 
change. 
In the structural character of the teeth themselves there is nothing that 
positively settles the question of their identity, though the evidence favors 
the assumption of their being the teeth of the domestic ox. My first com- 
* The following is a literal transcription of the document: “The teeth that I dug out of the clay-bank 
about fifteen feet below the surface ; was a solid bank of blue clay, so firm that it was impossible for any- 
thing to have got in there, there were no cracks or fissures that it could have fallen into as it was per- 
fectly solid ; there were four lying very nearly together in the solid clay and required such exertion to get 
them out that they could not at such a depth have got in by ordinary means. 
“ GEORGE SOULE of Avon. 1837.” 
+ Mrs. Elton informs me that now the original bank has been wholly removed. 
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