some North American Mastodons. Oe ae * 5 
bones of the extremities are perfect, with the exception of some 
of the terminal bones of the feet, and two or three of the inter- 
mediate phalanges. Some of these missing bones were removed 
with the mud and haye been recovered ; others will probably be 
found in the spring, after the sun has unbound the surface of the 
earth. 
_ All the bones are solid, and ring on being struck with a hard 
substance, Their colour is lighter than that of any of the Mas- 
todon specimens I have had an opportunity of seeing. On the 
whole, the state of preservation of these bones, considering the 
miry position in which they had lain for centuries unknown, 
must be a subject of admiration. They were found together in 
a very small lacustrine deposit four rods wide by fifteen rods 
long, where no other bones ever have been or are likely to be 
discovered, since the deposit has been dug to a considerable 
depth and removed. 
The manner of their discovery was this. In consequence of 
the uncommon dryness of the season, the proprietor of the farm 
had determined to remove the deposit for the purpose of manure. 
After taking away two feet of peat and two feet of red moss, the 
labourers entered a bed of shell-marl, and at the depth of a foot 
in this marl the head of the Mastodon was discovered. The 
thickness of the marl was about three feet, and under it was a 
bed of vegetable mud, which was penetrated by an iron rod to 
the depth of twenty feet. The bones, with very slight exceptions, 
were all lying in their natural relations to each other, the skele- 
ton being in an upright posture, so that there could be no mis- 
take as to the unity of the skeleton, nor as to the relative posi- 
tion of its parts. 
I have said nothing of the tusks nor of the deh 
The tusks are two in the upper jaw and one in the lower, 
Those of the upper jaw were when discovered about ten feet long 
(about two feet of which are now decomposed, four feet very 
much impaired and broken, and the remaining four feet, being 
the anterior extremity of the tusk, are in an almost perfect state). 
The tusk in the lower jaw is single. It is this tusk, which 
our excellent anatomists, Godman and Hays, considered as the 
distinctive character of the species Tetracaulodon. The perfect 
resemblance between the bones of my Mastodon and those of the 
one from New Jersey, most satisfactorily prove that they were 
both of the same species. The latter specimen is of a younger 
animal, as shown by the distinctness of the epiphyses, yet it has 
no tusk in the lower jaw. Whence it follows, that this sub- 
maxillary tusk may exist in the early life of both sexes, and 
disappear in the female at the adult age, but does not belong 
to a distinct species. The opinion, therefore, which you have 
