558 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
them met with an obstruction which he smashed with his spade and pitched to 
one side. It turned out to be a bone belonging to some gigantic animal, but 
nothing further was thought of it and the matter was forgotten. About two 
years ago it was decided to tile drain the same field, and in clearing out the old 
drain other bones were found. An enterprising individual by the name of Car- 
ter secured them, and after cleaning, varnishing, and duly labeling the relics, 
proceeded to exhibit them at so much a head, for the benefit of the rising gen- 
eration. Mr. Herschfelder came to hear of them, and after paying a good round 
sum secured the bones. Another payment secured the right to dig over Grum- 
ble's field, in which they were found. A gang of men were at once set to work. 
A ditch 75 feet long, 40 feet wide and four feet deep was dug, and the enthusi- 
astic archseologist was rewarded by finding fully one-half of the bones of a gi- 
gantic mastodon. It is needless to say they were very carefully taken from their 
resting place and boxed up for shipment to Toronto. They are in a remarkably 
good state of preservation, and their situation rendered the task of exhuming 
them one of comparative ease. The surface soil consists of a light sand, under 
which is a layer of decaying vegetable matter. Under this again is a harder layer 
of decaying vegetable mold; then comes a soft, yellowish- colored clay, and last the 
hard blue clay in which the remains were found, the latter being only about four 
feet below the surface. So far as known at present these are the first remains of 
the kind ever discovered in Canada. To give an idea of the huge proportions of 
this monster, whose race was extinct long before antiquity had begun, a few 
measurements of some of the bones which Mr. Herschfelder brought back with 
him are given. Several of the ribs measure 44 inches long by about 12 in cir- 
cumference. The lower jaw is no less than 30 inches long, and must have 
weighed, in the living animal, upwards of 150 pounds. The surface of one of 
the teeth is 7 inches long by 3^ wide, while the root is buried over 4 inches in 
the jaw. One vertebra measures 17 inches in length, and one of the bones of 
the fore leg 30 inches long by 24 inches in circumference. Mr. Herschfelder 
thinks he has fully one-half of the skeleton, and expects to get more. 
The mastodon is an extinct proboscidian mammal, coming near the 
elephant, and either in the tertiary or more recent deposits in all quarters of the 
globe, except Africa. It has the vaulted and cellular skull of the elephant, 
with large tusks in the upper jaw. From the character of the nasal bones and 
the shortness of the head and neck it is thought that, like the elephant, it had a 
trunk. A few remains of the mastodon had been discovered in the United 
States as early as 1705, but not until 1801 was anything like a complete skeleton 
obtained, when a tolerably complete one was found in Orange County, New 
York. 
The geological position of the remains of this species has long been and still 
is a subject of dispute amongst geologists. In a few instances they are said to 
have been found below the drift in the pliocene and even in the miocene, but 
they have generally been obtained from the post-pliocene or alluvial formations 
at a depth of from five to ten feet. Some have thought that the mastodons be- 
