552 Geological Society: Anniversary Address, 1843. 
The presence at Big Bone Lick, on the Ohio, in Kentucky, of 
great quantities of bones of buffaloes near the spot where salt sources 
issue through marshy lands, and the existence of the beaten tracks 
by which these animals approached this spot, render it highly pro- 
bable that they were allured thither during certain seasons in extra- 
ordinary numbers, and that many of them were engulfed and de- 
stroyed in the marshy ground. 
Mr. Lyell endeavours to show that what occurred within the 
historic zra to the buffalo, in all probability occurred also to the 
extinct mammals, whose bones are found in the subjacent clay 
and marsh to a depth of twenty-five feet, and are associated with 
modern fluviatile, terrestrial and lacustrine shells, showing that floods 
of the Ohio have drifted and re-arranged buffalo bones at higher 
levels than the comparatively ancient marsh. Mr. Lyell suggests, 
that no great physical revolution of the surface has taken place 
since the Mastodons died and were buried on the spot, and at a period 
not very remote from that in which we live. All these remains of ex- 
tinct quadrupeds, including a horse, which from the incurvated form 
of its teeth Professor Owen believes to have been of a different spe- 
cies from that which is now living, are said to have existed, as far 
as the author can judge, all over North America*, at a later period 
than the deposit of the great boulder drift when the continent was 
submerged beneath the sea which contained shells of modern species. 
In connexion with this subject, allusion is made to the observations 
in South America, of Sir W. Parish and Mr. Darwin; who found 
that the great Megatherioid quadrupeds lived at a very modern 
geological period. 
The same conclusion respecting the relative age of these fossil 
quadrupeds and the recent molluscous fauna, is fully substantiated 
by a clear section andan interesting memoir by Mr. Hamilton Couper 
of Georgia, recently read before this Society. This author acquaints 
us, that a shelly post-pliocene deposit, which extends far along the 
coast, and embraces exclusively marine shells of existing species, 
is covered by a swampy accumulation, in which the tusks of mam- 
moth and mastodon, often in excellent condition and little abraded, 
are grouped with the remains of the megatherium, horse, &e. 
All this indicates a very tranquil deposit, a slow and gradual 
emersion of the bottom of the sea, and a long-continued elevation of 
the land during the period of those great mammals which have since 
passed away and given place to man and the present races. 
In bringing before us such a number of clear proofs of successive 
oscillations of the continent of America, drawn from his own ob- 
servations and those of other authors, and in generalizing on them 
with his usual skill, Mr. Lyell further deduces a very important 
corollary from the Arctic character of the shells in the most recent 
marine or boulder formation of the northern part of the American 
continent. For, as there can exist no doubt, that whenever and 
wherever these shells were deposited, whether at Uddevalla in Swe- 
* Has any comparison been yet made between the teeth of the Ameri¢an 
and the European fossil horses? 
