THE MASTODON 209 
mastodon is far commoner in the museums of 
this country than is the African elephant, for 
at the present date there are eleven of the 
former to one of the latter, the single skeleton 
of African elephant being that of Jumbo in 
the American Museum of Natural History. 
If one may judge by the abundance of bones, 
mastodons must have been very numerous 
in some favored localities such as parts of 
Michigan, Florida, and Missouri and about 
Big Bone Lick, Ky. Perhaps the most note- 
worthy of all deposits is that at Kimmswick, 
about twenty miles south of St. Louis, wliere 
in a limited area Mr. L. W. Beehler has ex- 
humed bones representing several hundred 
individuals, varying in size from a mere baby 
mastodon up to the great tusker whose worn- 
out teeth proclaim that he had reached the 
limit of even mastodonic old age. The spot 
where this remarkable deposit was found is at 
the foot of a bluff near the junction of two 
little streams, and it seems probable that in 
the days when these were larger the spring 
floods swept down the bodies of animals that 
had perished during the winter to ground in 
