40 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



3 feet long, and has a diameter of 7V2 inches full, at its largest part; being 

 the upper or socket end of the tusk, and is well preserved, although much 

 shattered by drying and rough handling by the workmen before it came 

 to the attention of the engineers in charge of the work. 



The excavation at this point is through the salt meadow of the Harlem 

 river, showing from 4 to 6 feet of meadow sod and silt filled with the roots 

 of the meadow grass; below this there is a deep bed of incipient peat, of 

 which, at the spot where the tusk was found, there was fully 12 feet; next 

 below comes a bed of sandy clay of very variable thickness, but at the 

 spot in question measuring only 18 or 20 inches in thickness. This clay 

 rests immediately on the submerged slope of the dolomitic limestone ridge 

 which forms the upper end of Manhattan island, and extends northward 

 beyond the Spuyten Duyvil creek. 



The tusk was found imbedded in the peat with the socket or "butt" end 

 down, and slightly entering the sand, the shaft being in the peat and at 

 an angle of about 70 degrees to the horizontal, showing that it had settled 

 through the peat until it came in contact with the sand. 



From the indications furnished by the conditions of its occurrence I 

 should conclude that the tusk had not been transported from any other 

 locality after the death of the animal, as there is no abrasion shown on its 

 surface. Moreover, the peat in which it was imbedded is in the condition 

 of its original formation, is clean and unmixed with any foreign matter, 

 being entirely of vegetable origin: and contains quantities of seeds, appar- 

 ently of Carices, or sedges, and grasses, as well as a few nutlets of some 

 bush or shrub not yet determined, and examples of the elytra of beetles. 

 At the top of the peat occur numbers of the stumps and roots of forest 

 trees and fragments of wood. No evidence whatever is found of any 

 marine substance below the roots of marsh grass, not a vestige of any 

 kind of mollusks, marine or fresh water, can be detected, although now 

 living and abundant in the salt waters at the surface. The sandy clay 

 between the peat and the surface of the limestone appears to me to be the 

 result, principally, of the decomposition of the limestone in place, and not 

 transported sand. Glacial markings are discoverable on the surface of the 

 limestone a short distance south of the locality, where the soil has pro- 

 tected it from the action of the weather, but where the ledge has been 

 uncovered by the removal of the peat and sand, it shows a deeply rotted 

 surface covered by the sand. 



Dyckman's creek was an artificially excavated channel, made about 1818, 

 for the purposes of a tide mill, through a natural depression at that point, 

 and not a natural stream; consequently, it could have had no agency in 

 the transportation of the tusk; and it seems probable that the animal to 

 which the tusk once belonged either died near the spot, or by some acci- 

 dental injury had it broken from its socket near where it was found. 



The exact location of its occurrence is in the canal, about 15 feet from 

 its northern side, and about 10 feet west of the center of Broadway. 



Niagara County 

 46 1840? Niagara Falls. Both Hall and Lyell mention the 

 finding of mastodon remains at Niagara Falls. Hall 51a states : "A 

 molar tooth was found in digging a mill-race at Niagara falls, 

 several feet below the surface. The deposit in which it occurs is 

 a fine gravel and loam containing fresh-water shells, and is evidently 

 a fluviatile deposit." Hall further adds (page 396) that the place 

 was " upon the east side of the river, of the same elevation as Goat 

 Island. It was at this place, and in the same deposit, that a mas- 



" a Nat. Hist. N. Y. Geology, pt 4, 1843, p. 364, 396. 



