114: DAVENPORT ACADEMY OF NATL'RAL SCIEN'CES. 



bones ; the manner of his hearing of this, and his arrival on the spot in 

 the month of October, 18.SS, he proceeds thus : " The whole situation in 

 which I found the remaining bones bore every evidence that the animal 

 whose frame they constituted had been destroyed by human hands, which 

 is a circumstance of the highest importance, as I believe no similar one 

 has exhibited itself, or been recorded in geology or history, with the excep- 

 tion of some few Indian traditions, which have been generally discred- 

 ited, and probably originated in their vague conceptions of the Supreme 

 Being. 



'' The principal part of the animal had been consumed by fire, that had 

 not been created by a volcanic eruption, but had been made of wood, as I 

 found nine feet beneath the surface a layer of ashes from six (6) to twelve 

 (12) inches in thickness, mingled with charcoal, large pieces of wood partly 

 burned, together with Indian implements of war, as stone arrowheads, 

 tomahawks, etc. I also found more than one hundred and fifty (150) 

 pieces of rocks, varying from three (8) to twenty-five (25) pounds in 

 weight, which must have been carried from the rocky shores of the Bur- 

 boise (Bourbeuse) River, a distance of three hundred (300) yards, as there 

 was no rock, stone, or even gravel near to be found ; and these pieces of 

 rock taken out of the ashes were precisely the same as chat found in the 

 river, which is a species of limestone. These had been thrown evidently 

 with the intention of striking the animal. 



" I am more of the belief that the animal got mired, than that it died 

 a natural death, as I found the fore and hind foot standing in a perpen- 

 dicular position, and likewise the full length of the leg below the layer 

 of ashes, so deep in the mud and water that the fire had no effect on 

 them. AYhereas, if the animal had died in any other way, these feet and 

 legs could not have remained in their standing position, but would have 

 fallen into a recumbent or reclining posture. As it is indisputable that 

 the animal could not have died and remained standing after its death, 

 excepting that it was so deeply mired that it could not fall ; in which 

 case the fire would have had no perceivable effect on the carcass." 



It must be said that Dr. Koch's account met with a more favorable re- 

 ception in Europe, especially in Germany ; and it was not very many years 

 before the abundant proofs of the coexistence of man and the mammoth 

 in that hemisphere, even to a drawing of the latter animal on its own 

 ivory, forced an almost universal belief of it. We cannot trace in this 

 country, as in Eui'ope, the existence of man to period when he was the 

 contemporary of many extinct mammalia, and when the outlines of land 

 and sea, and the conditions of climate over large parts of the earth were 

 wholly different from what they now are. But he can be traced beyond 

 the last great change, for Dr. Abbott found worked flint implements in 

 the glacial drift of New Jersey, and he rightly infers, " that if man was 

 a 2)re-glacial occupant of this continent, he must have been familiar with the 

 mastodon.''''* 



The works of man have been repeatedly found in this country in con- 



*LeUer to the writer. 



