ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. IxXXl 



Megaceros in Ireland and the Isle of Man is entombed in lacnstrine 

 deposits covered with peat, so are the extinct mammalia of Siberia in 

 similar formations of a like age. 



We learn from the recent observations of Mr. Lyell, that in the 

 same modern geological epoch during which Siberia was inhabited 

 by herds of the mammoth, rhinoceros and aurochs, the continent of 

 North America was the abode of mammalia now extinct, their re- 

 mains being found in deposits of gravel associated with existing 

 species of fluviatile and terrestrial testacea, and also with marine 

 shells of the same species as are now living in the neighbouring sea. 

 Thus at Geneseo, in lat. 42° 50', he saw the skull, ivory tusks and 

 vertebrse of a mastodon, dug out of a bed of shell, marl and sand, 

 the shells being all of existing freshwater and land species now com- 

 mon in that district * . He visited two other localities in Albany and 

 Green counties in the state of New York, where the same remains 

 had been found in similar circumstances. On the sea-shore near 

 Savannah, he disinterred from a bed of clay the grinder of a mastodon, 

 the clay resting immediately on sand containing marine shells of 

 living species ; and a tooth of the mylodon was found in the same 

 spot. Farther south in Georgia, in lat. 31° 25', two entire skeletons 

 of the megatherium were met with. " It is evident," says Mr. Lyell, 

 " from the observations of Mr. Hamilton Cooper and my own, that at 

 a comparatively recent period, since the Atlantic was inhabited by the 

 existing species of marine testacea, there was an upheaval and laying 

 dry of the bed of the ocean in this region. The new land supported 

 forests in which the megatherium, mylodon, mastodon, elephant, and a 

 species of horse different from the common one, and other quadrupeds 

 lived, and were occasionally buried in the swamps f ." On the western 

 side of the x\lleghanies, in Kentucky, at the spot called the Big Bone 

 Lick, in lat. 38° 50', entire skeletons of extinct animals and the se- 

 parate bones have been found in black mud, containing recent terres- 

 trial and freshwater shells about twelve feet belov/ the surface. " It 

 is supposed that the bones of mastodons found here could not have 

 belonged to less than a hundred distinct individuals ; those of the 

 fossil elephant {E. primigenius) to twenty ; besides which, bones of 

 a stag, horse, megalonyx and bison are stated to have been obtained. 

 It is impossible to view this plain," Mr. Lyell adds, "without at 

 once concluding that it has remained unchanged in all its principal 

 features from the period when the extinct quadrupeds inhabited the 

 banks of the Ohio audits tributaries ;;{:." 



Dr. Daubeny read last year before the Ashmolean Society of Ox- 

 ford a paper which contains an account of the extinct volcano of 

 Rocca Monfina near Naples . It is very rem.arkable that a volcanic moun- 

 tain of such magnitude as to be nearly 3300 feet in height, having a 

 circular crater more than two miles and a half in diameter, with a 

 conical hill rising from the centre high above the outer edge of the crater, 



* Travels in North America, vol. i. p. 55. 



t Id. p. 164. % Id. vol. ii. p. 65. 



