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 i 
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ee Sa er 
ea 
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 Novemnbaaly + 
17th, in which he Geo of a large work in — | 
