279 



Bluff, 170 feet below the surface. When obtained, the specimen was rotten 

 wood, so decayed as to be easily crushed between the fingers. The ligneous 

 fibre was very palpable, and showed it to be oak. After twenty days ex- 

 posure, it was covered with a fine frost of Copperas, (Sulph. Iron,) and was 

 transformed into beautiful lignite. 14. A piece of Brick, from the Mounds 

 on Lake St. Joseph, Louisiana. Its porousness, Mr. F. found from some spe- 

 cimens imperfectly burnt, arises from the entire combustion of the moss used 

 to give the mortar consistency. 15. An Iron Ore, from the pudding stone 

 forming at the base of the Natchez Bluffs. When first broken the cavity was 

 filled with white potter's clay, coated with brown ochre at the surface. 16. A 

 specimen of the Spanish Moss, Tillandsia Usneoides, from Natchez, Missis- 

 sippi. 



The Committee, consisting of Dr. Horner and Dr. Hays, 

 appointed on the 3d of January last, to report to the Society a 

 description of a donation of Mastodon Bones, made to the So- 

 ciety by a subscription of members, gave in their report, which 

 was directed to be printed in the Transactions of the Society. 



The Committee, consisting of Dr. Hays, Mr. Peale, and Dr. 

 Dunglison, to whom was referred a paper entitled " Note of 

 the Remains of the Mastodon, and some other extinct animals, 

 collected together in St. Louis, Missouri; by W. E. Horner, 

 M.D., Professor of Anatomy University of Pennsylvania," re- 

 commended that an abstract of the same should be inserted in 

 the Bulletin of the Society's Proceedings; and on motion, the 

 report was accepted, and the committee discharged. 



The collection referred to, was made by Mr. Albert Koch — a Ger- 

 man resident in St. Louis, for the last five years — and has been ob- 

 tained principally from two localities, Rock Creek, twenty miles south 

 of St. Louis, and Gasconade County, two hundred miles above the 

 mouth of the Missouri riyer. It consists of two hundred or more 

 Teeth of the Mastodon and of the American Elephant. A dozen or 

 more Lower Jaws of the Mastodon, with very numerous specimens of 

 other parts of the head and skeleton generally, though there is no 

 perfect head. 



The most remarkable specimen is a head of an animal, which Mr. 

 Koch calls nondescript, and considers to have been from four to six 

 times the size of an elephant, though Dr. Horner esteems it extremely 

 difficult to establish this. In the present mode of exhibition, the head 

 shows a central oblong amorphous part, which measures six feet in 

 length by two or three in width. It is furnished with enormous 



