132. Scientific Intelligence. 
In spite of much quackery and pretence, not only on the part of the 
notorious “ author of the two largest known animals,” (i. e. the ‘* Missou- 
rium” here figured, and the Hydrarchos,) but also, from those, whose 
position and opportunities should have produced better things,* we 
have at length settled quietly down upon the true and well ascertained 
characters of the great American mastodon. Dr. J. B.S. Jackson 
has given us a lucid statement. of the principal osteological characters 
of the mastodon.t | His observations were made on the skeleton found 
at Schooley’s Mountain in New Jersey in 1844, which was. however 
deficient in the sternum, a few caudal vertebree and the feet. 
He determined from this skeleton, that the animal had twenty dorsal 
vertebrae, whereas Cuvier and Owen make but nineteen ; this observation 
is confirmed by the skeleton found at Newburght last summer, (1845,) 
Raabe Aria Sialic’ athens maka: Bia 
those who. did not see this “ anatomical fiction,” a good idea of its awful pro- 
portions. It will be remembered as one characteristic of the genus “ Missou- 
viding that the tusks were placed at ninety degrees from their true position, 
pointing outward and backward. The trustees of the British Museum paid the 
t Proceedings of the Boston Soc. Nat. Hist., Oct. 1,1845, p. 60. 
+ American Journal of Science, Second Series, i, 269. See also a letter of 
a - Warren's to Mr. Owen, published in the Ann. Mag. of Nat. Hist., for March, 
546, No. iii, p. 145, in which he says the vertebral column has “7 cervical verte- 
bree, 20 dorsal, 3 lumbar, and the os sacrum.” ‘The ribs, 20 in number, are perfect. 
v 
