443 EXTINCT QUADRUPEDS. 



planted in the lower jaw like those of the Dinotherium, but bent for- 

 ward, and two others in the upper jaw, having the same direction, 

 but being of a prodigious length. Buffon named it the " Animal of 

 the Ohio," because its fossil remains were discovered on the banks of 

 that great river. They have also been found in other parts of North 

 America, and particularly in the saline morass known as Big-bone 

 Lick, in the northern districts of Kentucky. Several skeletons, almost 

 perfect, have been excavated at a moderate depth, and some of them 

 in a vertical position, as if the animals had been stricken with death 

 while standing, and suddenly engulfed in the mud. 



Many curious fables are told by the Indians in reference to this 

 extinct quadruped. The Shawnee Indians believe that contemporary 

 with them lived a race of men of proportionate dimensions, and that 

 the Great Being destroyed both the one and the other with thunder- 

 bolts. Those of Virginia state that the " Great Man on High " slew 

 this colossal genus, because it was exterminating the animals created 

 for the use of man, and that none escaped but the hugest bull, who, 

 having been wounded by the celestial bolts, fled towards the great 

 lakes, in whose solitudes he wanders to this very day. The Indians 

 of Canada and Louisiana designate the Mastodon by the name of 

 " Father of the Bulls," probably on account of the bones of cattle 

 disinterred with his own. 



The Mammoth (Elephas primigenius) is known to us only by the 

 fossil remains which have been discovered embedded in the glacial 

 deposits of the Intermediate epoch. The first discovery took place 

 in 1799, under circumstances which are thus recorded in the 

 Zoologist. 



In 1799, a lungusian fisherman observed, in a bank on the 

 shore of the Frozen Ocean, at the mouth of the river Lena, a shape- 

 less mass almost enveloped in ice, and he was quite unable to deter- 

 mine what it might be. In the following year a larger portion of 

 this mass became visible, but the fisherman was still unable to dis- 

 cover its nature. Towards the end of the following summer, how- 

 ever, one of the tusks and an entire side of a fossilized animal were 



