44 SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 



During the season we had occasion to examine a reported find of 

 mammoth and mastodon hones on a truck farm near the ocean helow 

 St. Augustine. Here we found that the workmen, under the direction 

 of the son of the farm foreman, had excavated the large part of a 

 skeleton of the mammoth, but as they then planned to keep the speci- 

 men for private exhibit we did no excavating there and returned to 

 Melbourne. The most important work done other than at Melbourne 

 was along the St. Lucie Canal, about 12 miles east of Lake Okeechobee 

 near Indiantown. Here we secured a well preserved pair of lower 

 jaws and a few other parts of a mammoth, and did sufficient develop- 

 ment work to determine that the general geologic structure is the 

 same as that at Vero and Melbourne. The formation underlying the 

 No. 2 bed in the Indiantown locality, however, seems to vary in 

 character more than at Melbourne, where marine shells form the 

 greater part of the mass. At Indiantown large masses of sand under- 

 lie thin layers of shells or in certain areas replace them entirely. The 

 item of greatest value, perhaps, resulting from our work in this lo- 

 cality, was the finding of a molar tooth of one of the more primitive 

 mastodons. This tooth came from a consolidated bed of sand about 

 20 feet below the present surface of the land and underlying a thin 

 shell layer of supposedly older age than our fossil-bearing beds known 

 as the Melbourne or No. 2 bed formation. The mastodon tooth in 

 question is of the type of those found commonly in the Pliocene, and 

 thus implies either that the lower strata of the fossil beds at Indian- 

 town are Pliocene in age, or that here in Florida this particular species 

 of mastodon lived on into the Pleistocene, or still more probably, the 

 tooth may have been redeposited, in the place where found, from an 

 older deposit of Pliocene age. 



This and other interesting problems in connection with the early 

 history of Florida remain still to be solved, and it is only by a con- 

 tinuation of systematic work similar to that which the Smithsonian 

 Institution has been carrying on for the past few years that this can 

 be done. 



