74 FOSSIL WHALE, [CHAP. XXIV. 



out-of-the-way districts of England, France, or Italy, 

 at travellers who devote money and time to a search 

 for fossil bones and shells, each planter seemed to vie 

 with another in his anxiety to give me information 

 in regard to the precise spots where organic remains 

 had been discovered. Many were curious to learn 

 my opinion as to the kind of animal to which the 

 huge vertebra?, against which their ploughs some 

 times strike, may have belonged. The magnitude, 

 indeed, and solidity of these relics of the colossal 

 zeuglodon, are such as might well excite the asto 

 nishment of the most indifferent. Dr. Buckley 

 informed me, that on the estate of Judge Creagh, 

 which I visited, he had assisted in digging out one 

 skeleton, where the vertebral column, almost un 

 broken, extended to the length of seventy feet, and 

 Dr. Emmons afterwards showed me the greater part 

 of this skeleton in the Museum of Albany, New 

 York. On the same plantation, part of another back 

 bone, fifty feet long, was dug up, and a third was 

 met with at no great distance. Before I left Ala 

 bama, I had obtained evidence of so many localities 

 of similar fossils, chiefly between Macon and Clarkes- 

 ville, a distance of ten miles, that I concluded they 

 must have belonged to at least forty distinct in 

 dividuals. 



I visited, with Mr. Pickett, the exact spot where 

 he and Mr. Koch disinterred a portion of the skeleton 

 afterwards exhibited in New York under the name 

 of Hydrarchos, or &quot; the Water- king.&quot; The bones were 

 imbedded in a calcareous marly stratum of the Eocene 

 formation, and I observed in it many casts of the 



