CHAP. XXIV.] FOSSIL WHALE, OR ZEUGLODON. C5 



magnitude, indeed, and solidity of these relics of the colossal zeug- 

 lodon, are such as might well excite the astonishment 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 unbroken, ex 

 tended to the length of seventy feet, and Dr. Emmons afterward 

 showed me the greater part of this skeleton in the Museum of 

 Albany, New York. On the same plantation, part of another 

 backbone, fifty feet long, was dug up, and a third was met with 

 at no great distance. Before I left Alabama, I had obtained 

 evidence of so many localities of similar fossils, chiefly between 

 Macon and Clarkesville, a distance of ten miles, that I concluded 

 they must have belonged to at least forty distinct individuals. 



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

 Koch disinterred a portion of the skeleton afterward 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 cham 

 bers of a large nautilus, which were at first mistaken by Koch 

 for the paddles of the huge animal. Portions of the vertebral 

 column, exhibited by him, in 1845, at New York and Boston, 

 were procured in Washington County, fifteen miles distant in a 

 direct line from this place, where the head was discovered.* 

 Some single vertebra, which I found here, were so huge and so 

 impregnated with carbonate of lime, that I could not lift them 

 from the ground without an effort. Professor Jeffries Wyman 

 was the first who clearly pointed out that the bones, of which 

 the factitious skeleton called Hydrarchos was made up, must 

 have belonged to different individuals. They were in different 

 stages of ossification, he said, some adult, others immature, a 

 state of things never combined in one and the same individ 

 ual. Mr. Owen had previously maintained, that the animal was 

 not reptilian, but cetacean, because each tooth was furnished 

 with double roots, implanted in corresponding double sockets. 

 After my return from America, a nearly entire skull of the zeug- 

 lodon was found by Mr. S. F. Holmes and Professor L. ft, 

 * See &quot;American Jour, of Science,&quot; New Series, vol. i. p. 312. 



