AMERICAN GEOLOGY MACLUREAN ERA, 1785-1819. 213 



Franklin was not the only one of our statesmen who at that time 

 felt at liberty to indulge in study and speculation on scientific subjects. 

 Thomas Jefferson, when he came to Philadelphia to be inaugurated 

 Vice-President in 1797, brought with him a collection 

 PaV^ntoiolift, 1797. °f fossil bones from the western part of Virginia, and 

 the manuscript of a memoir upon them, which he read 

 before the American Philosophical Society, of which he had been 

 elected president the preceding year. a And again in 1801, when Con- 

 gress was vainly trying to untangle the difficulties arising from the tie 

 vote between Jefferson and Burr, when every politician at the Capitol 

 was busy with schemes and counter-schemes, Jefferson was corre- 

 sponding with Doctor Wistar in regard to some bones of the mam- 

 moth which he had just procured from Shawangunk, in New York; 

 and still again, in 1808, when the excitement over the embargo was 

 highest, and when every day brought fresh denunciation of him and 

 his policy, he was carrying on his geological studies in the White 

 House itself. Under his direction upward of three hundred speci- 

 mens of fossil bones had been brought from the famous Big Bone 

 Lick, of Kentucky, and spread in one of the large unfinished rooms 

 of the Presidential Mansion. The exploration of this lick, it should 

 be noted, was made at the private expense of Jefferson, through the 

 agency of Gen. William Clarke, the western explorer. 6 



The appearance of bones of animals of large size and now extinct, 

 as described by Jefferson, naturally excited the attention of the 

 curious, and numerous accounts of similar occurrences began to find 

 their way into print. In the Transactions of the American Philo- 

 sophical Society, under date of 1802, is given an abstract of a commu- 

 nication by Martin Duvalde regarding the finding of bones supposed to 

 be those of an elephant in the Opelousas country west of the Missis- 

 sippi, i. e.. in Louisiana. 



Of greater interest, however, is a paper by the artist and naturalist, 

 Rembrandt Peale, entitled Account of the Skeleton of the Mammoth, 

 A Nondescript Carnivorous Animal of Immense Size Found in Amer- 

 ica. This was printed in London under date of 1802, 

 t P he a Mammo O t U h nt i O 802. and dedicated to Sir Joseph Banks, Bart., President 

 of the Royal Society. The particular skeleton de- 

 scribed was exhumed in the vicinity of Newburgh, New York, in 1801/ 

 The animal was regarded by Peale as unquestionably carnivorous from 



"This paper was published in the Transactions of the Society, IV, 17W, as was 

 also Doctor Wistar's more detailed description of the bones themselves. 



''The Origin of the National Scientific and Educational Institutions of the United 

 States, by G. Brown Goode. 



'Sufficient material was found to form two skeletons, one of which was sent to 

 London and the other to Philadelphia, where it was subsequently destroyed by fire. 



