26 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



" Discovery of a part of a skeleton on Willow street in this village 

 has been reported. The bones found consisted of a few ribs, ver- 

 tebrae and leg bones and it is stated that a jaw bearing teeth was 

 also uncovered." Most of the remains are in a splendid state of 

 preservation and are now in the Holland Land Office Museum at 

 Batavia. 



28 1916. South Byron. About 1916 a molar of a mastodon was 

 found on the farm of Mrs E. H. Miller. The location is a short 

 distance south of the village at an altitude near 700 feet, and 8 

 miles northeast from the mastodon locality in Batavia village. At 

 the present writing the tooth is in the possession of Mrs Miller. 



Greene County 



29 1706. Coxsackie. This mastodon, whose remains were 

 found some miles below Albany, probably in the town of Coxsackie, 

 was the second found in America. The year before, in 1705, the 

 first specimen found by white settlers had been uncovered at 

 Claverack. It is no wonder then that great curiosity and doubt was 

 expressed as to the kind of animal to which the remains belonged. 



Among the manuscripts of Cotton Mather, deposited at one time 

 with the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester, was a letter 

 to him from Governor Joseph Dudley in which an accoimt is given 

 of these mastodon remains from the vicinity of Albany, N. Y. The 

 letter was first printed in the Collections of the Massachusetts 

 Historical Society 27 and later in Eager's History of Orange County. 

 As an early record of mastodon remains from this locality, it is 

 herewith presented in its entirety: 



" Roxbury, 10 July, 1706. 

 " Sir, I was surprised a few days since with a present laid before 

 me from Albany, by two honest Dutchmen, inhabitants of that city, 

 which was a certain tooth accompanied with some other pieces of 

 bone, which being but fragments, without any points whereby they 

 might be determined to what animals they did belong, I could make 

 nothing of them; but the tooth was of the perfect form of the eye 

 tooth of a man, with four prongs or roots, and six distinct faces 

 or flats on the top, a little worn, and all perfectly smoothed with 

 grinding. I suppose all the surgeons in town have seen it, and I 

 am perfectly of opinion it was a human tooth. I measured it, and 

 as it stood upright it was six inches high lacking one-eighth, and 



27 Second ser. 1814: 2:263-64. See also Phil. Trans. Royal Soc. Lond.. 

 1814, 29:62. 



