204 ANIMALS OF THE PAST 



ence are rare, and east of that they are practi- 

 cally wanting. The best preserved specimens 

 come from Ulster and Orange Counties, New 

 York, for these seem to have furnished the 

 animal with the best facilities for getting mired. 

 Just west of the Catskills, parallel with the 

 valley of the Hudson, is a series of meadows, 

 bogs, and pools marking the sites of swamps 

 that came into existence after the recession of 

 the mighty ice-sheet that long covered eastern 

 North America, and in these many a masto- 

 don, seeking for food or water, or merely wal- 

 lowing in the mud, stuck fast and perished 

 miserably. And here to-day the spade of the 

 farmer as he sinks a ditch to drain what is left 

 of some beaver pond of bygone days, strikes 

 some bone as brown and rugged as a root, so 

 like a piece of water-soaked wood that nine 

 times out of ten it is taken for a fragment of 

 tree-trunk. 



The first notice of the mastodon in North 

 America goes back to 1712, and is found in a 

 letter from Cotton Mather to Dr. Woodward 

 (of England?) written at Boston on November 

 17th, in which he speaks of a large work in 



