10 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



remains of mastodon occurred in both places at a depth of 4 or 5 

 feet, precisely in such situation as would yield shell marl, and, peat, 

 with remains of existing animals in Scotland. Cattle have recently 

 been mired in these swamps." 



The date of this find is given by Clarke as 1835? (New York 

 State Mus. Bui. 69, 1903, p. 929). None of the bones of this find 

 are believed to have been preserved and there are no records show- 

 ing that they were ever received in the State Museum or the Albany 

 Institute. There is thus no direct evidence to determine whether 

 the animal was a mastodon or ( a mammoth. On the basis of other 

 known finds in this section of the State the chances are that it was 

 a mastodon. 



2 1866. Cohoes (plates 1, 3, 4). The peculiar circumstances 

 under which the skeleton of the Cohoes mastodon was discovered, 

 have given the specimen wide publicity. The lower jaw and a single 

 foot bone were found on a ledge of rock, on the side of a pot hole, 

 by workmen excavating for the foundations of the Harmony Mills 

 at Cohoes, N. Y., in September 1866. Continued excavations re- 

 vealed the principal parts of the skeleton at a lower level of the 

 same pothole; and in February of the year following, a few other 

 bones (those of the right fore leg and foot) in a smaller pothole 

 about 60 feet to the southwest of the larger one. Most of the bones 

 were lying on a bed of clay and broken slate above a layer of water- 

 worn pebbles. Above the bones there was an accumulation of 

 muck, peaty soil with fragments of limbs and rotten, beaver-gnawed 

 wood and artificial fill, almost 60 feet in thickness. 



The surface of the rock in which the potholes were excavated 

 lies at a level almost 100 feet above the present surface of the river 

 bed below the Cohoes falls. Hall 5 thought the potholes had been 

 formed by the action of surface waters falling through crevasses 

 in the ice sheet to the rock beneath but this interpretation has been 

 generally abandoned in favor of the theory that they are of a post- 

 glacial origin. Quoting H. L. Fairchild, O. P. Ha)' 6 states that at 

 the time of the withdrawal of the ice sheet, the site of Cohoes was 

 depressed about 350 feet below the present level and covered with 

 a thick deposit of sand and clay laid down in the bed of Lake 

 Albany. With the elevation of the land, Lake Albany was drained 

 and, the ancient Mohawk (Iromohawk) cut through the deposited 

 sands and clays, reached bedrock and drilled the potholes. 



1 N. Y. State Cab. :Nat. Hist. 21st Annual Rep't, 1871, p. 105. 

 Science 1919, 49:379- 



