Montreal Natural History Society. 39 



The remains were found in a swamp, about one and a half mile 

 north of Dunville, partly imbedded in a layer of fine sand, holding 

 fresh water shells of species now living in our rivers, lakes and 

 ponds. The sand is two and a half feet thick, rests upon Boulder- 

 clay, and is overlaid by one and a half feet of black vegetable mould. 

 None of the bones, as I understand, were found in the clay, but 

 they partly projected up out of the sand into the mould. It is clear, 

 therefore, that this animal lived long after the close of the Glacial 

 period. 



From Dunville I went to the Niagara Falls, where there are pre- 

 served in Mr. Barnett's museum, a nearly perfect lower jaw of 

 a small Mastodon from St. Thomas, Ontario. The molars are all in 

 place, and the specimen is interesting, as it retains the two small 

 tusks that are seen in the lower jaw of the young Mastodon, but not in 

 the adult. Mr. Barnett has anumber of other teeth andlower jaws, both 

 of the Mastodon and Mammoth, which he has collected from different 

 places in the western parts of Ontario. There are three molars of 

 the Mastodon in the Provincial museum from London, besides the 

 collection of Mammoth's bones from Hamilton. These are all the 

 fossil elephantine remains that have been collected in Canada to my 

 knowledge. 



It is worthy of note that none of these remains were collected 

 east of the western extremity of Lake Ontario. It would seem that 

 when the Mastodon and Mammoth roamed over Canada, the distri- 

 bution of land and water was somewhat different from what it is 

 now. The great escarpment (usually called the Niagara ridge) 

 which runs from Lewiston to Hamilton and thence to Owen Soimd, 

 formed a shore of only a few feet in height, and all west of it was a 

 low flat country abounding in swampy land, where gi-ew the cedar, 

 spruce, and other evergreens, upon whose leaves and twigs the 

 Mastodon appears to have subsisted. Easterly there was a great 

 fresh-water sea that covered a large area of the present dry land of 

 Canada, and of the neighbouring states. No remains of these 

 animals have been found in Canada at any place east of Hamilton ; 

 and it is not difficult to show that those collected there had been 

 drifted down from the interior by the river that once flowed through 

 the ravine at Dundas. In the States they have been collected in 

 numerous localities all over the country, to some point as far east as 

 Massachusetts. A line drawn north-easterly from Hamilton to New 

 Brunswick would, according to our present knowledge, form the 

 north-western boundary of the country inhabited by the IMastodon 

 and Mammoth in the Dominion. 



Principal Dawson, LL.D., F.E.S., F.G.S., &c., exhibited some 

 specimens of graphite from Buckingham, Q.C., and remarked on the 

 parallelism between its mode of occurrence, whether in beds or 

 veins, with that of the occurrence of bituminous matter, of organic 

 origin, in limestones and shales, and in the veins or fissures tra- 

 versing such rocks ; arguing that if the graphite of the Laurentian 

 rocks is assumed to be of organic origin, these rocks, when originally 

 deposited, must have held vast quantities of vegetable debris, and 



