HAVE SUCCEEDED THEM. MASTODONS. 375 



enumerated, alive, in the fresh water brooks near Fish- 

 kill. 



The vegetables growing in these little swamps, by their 

 abundance and decay, furnished a great quantity of resi- 

 due, which on drying is found to be inflammable ; being 

 in reality a kind of peat. In some places this is twenty 

 feet, or even more, in depth, making a miry bog, in which 

 every heavy body, capable of breaking through the turfy 

 Covering of roots and plants, immediately goes to the 

 bottom. In many of them, a person who ventures on, may 

 shake and agitate the tough surface for several rods 

 around. 



The region watered by the Wallkill is peculiarly the 

 land of the American mammoth. The history of their 

 teeth, tusks and bones, as discovered from time to time by 

 the citizens, has already been written by Silvanus Miller, 

 Esq. and Dr. James G. Graham. Their respective essays 

 are recorded in the 4th volume of the Medical Repo- 

 sitory. Mr. Rembrant Peale has also published an inte- 

 resting account of the expedition made by his venerable 

 father, Charles Wilson Peale, Esq. to this district, to ob- 

 tain the materials from which he has framed the skeleton 

 which gives interest and grandeur to his rich museum in 

 Philadelphia. To these several sources of information I 

 refer ; observing, at the same time, that in this tract of 

 country there have probably been discovered more 

 fragments of mammoth remains, than in any other 

 district of equal extent on the face of the globe. I refer 

 to the writings of the late Professor Benjamin Smith Bar- 

 ton, of the ex-President Thomas Jefferson, and of Go- 

 vernor Dewitt Clinton, as great authorities on this sub- 

 ject. 



