214 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1904. 



the structure of the teeth and jaw, and he concluded his description 

 with a quotation from Doctor Dunter: 



If this animal was indeed carnivorous, which I believe can not be doubted, though 

 we .may as philosophers regret it, as men we cannot but thank Heaven that its 

 whole generation is probably extinct." 



Turning- once more to the Transactions of the American Philosoph- 

 ical Society, we find in 1799 Thomas P. Smith giving an account of 

 " crystalline basalts " found in the Conewago Hills, near Elizabeth- 

 town in Pennsylvania. The "crystals " were described 

 the Conewago Hiiis, as generally tetrahedral and of very fine grain. The 

 massive, noncolumnar form was spoken of as amor- 

 phous, but it "has generally a very strong tendency to crystallize." 

 Cr} r stallized granite in predominating tetrahedral forms was also de- 

 scribed. In the same transactions (1807) S. Godon made certain obser- 

 vations for a mineralogical map of Maryland, in which he noted the 

 occurrence of gneiss and greenstone in the the vicinity of Washington, 

 and the finding of "fossil bodies," shells, and fossil woods in a ravine 

 near Rock Creek Church. The city itself was rightly described as 

 built on alluvial land, Rock Creek forming the boundary between the 

 primary and alluvial soil. 



In February of this same } T ear B. H. Latrobe read before the society 

 a paper describing the geographic distribution of the sand rock quar- 

 ried at Aquia Creek on the Potomac, and used in some of the public 

 buildings of Washington. The marked cross-bedding, so prominent a 

 feature in the stone, he ascribed to wind action. A fact of more geo- 

 logical importance is, however, his recognition of the "fall line" — of 

 the fact that a line drawn along the lower falls of our rivers is the 

 ancient line of the seacoast from New York to the southwest, and indi- 

 cates a higher ocean level of some 120 feet. Schopf, it will be remem- 



«The first mention of bones of the American mammoth upon record appears to be 

 that made by Dr. Cotton Mather, of Boston, in a paper communicated to the Royal 

 Society in 1714. The object of this worthy divine seems to have been to corroborate, 

 by the discovery of the bones, the account given in Scripture of a race of antediluvian 

 giants. He inclines to this opinion from the circumstance that bones have been dug 

 up in America of an enormous size, and yet resembling in their formation those of 

 the human body. These bones, he states, were found in 1705 near Albany, on the 

 Hudson. Among them was a grinder weighing 4f pounds; another tooth, broad and 

 flat, like an incisor; a third like the eye tooth of man when worn away by mastica- 

 tion, and a bone, supposed to be that of the thigh, which was 17 feet in length. The 

 ground for 75 feet around the spot where these bones were discovered he asserts t<> 

 have been of a different color and substance from the surrounding, a difference which 

 he attributes to the effects produced by the rotting of the flesh of the animal. Some 

 of these bones were found at a distance of 50 leagues from the sea, and at a great 

 depth in the earth. An account, so manifestly tinctured by credulity and evincing 

 such entire ignorance of anatomy, excited but little attention in the scientific world, 

 and scarce any further notice of these bones can be found for nearly thirty years,— 

 An Account of the Fossil Bones of the Great American Mammoth, by John Ward, 

 M. D., in Boston Journal of Philosophy, I, 1823-24, pp. 263,264. 



