THE MASTODON. 15 



vantage of a complete skeleton, for only fragments or parts 

 were known until 1801. In that year Charles W. Peale, 

 after much persevering labor, produced one nearly com- 

 plete from the morasses of Orange county, New York. 

 His son, Rembrandt Peale, published, in London, in 1803, 

 a description of this skeleton, in a pamphlet of ninety-one 

 pages, with the title, "An Historical Disquisition on the 

 Mammoth, or, Great American Incognitum, an Extinct, 

 Immense, Carnivorous Animal, whose Fossil Remains have 

 been found in North America." This skeleton occupied 

 a prominent place in Peale's Museum at Philadelphia, 

 until 1849, when it suddenly disappeared. It is believed 

 to have fallen into the hands of Professor Kaup, of Darm- 

 stadt, Germany. (For description see Appendix). 



In the year 1840, Dr. Albert Koch discovered a skeleton 

 of the mastodon in Benton county, Missouri, near the 

 banks of the Pomme-de-Terre River, about ten miles 

 above its junction with the Osage. The bones were im- 

 bedded in a brown sandy deposit full of vegetable matter, 

 with recognizable remains of the cypress, tropical cane, 

 and swamp moss, stems of the palmetto, etc., and this 

 covered by beds of blue clay and gravel to a thickness 

 of about fifteen feet. Dr. P. R. Hoy * ciaims to have 

 visited the spot very soon after this discovery had been 

 made, and declares the excavation to have been fifteen 

 feet in diameter and six feet in depth, and the skeleton 

 was struck upon at a depth of two feet. Dr. Hoy's state- 

 ment, which was written to disprove that of Dr. Koch, 

 would force the skeleton into a space of only four feet in 

 depth, which supposition is only admissible by presuming 

 that the skeleton had been broken up and afterwards 

 washed there. Out of the bones of this skeleton, together 

 with many belonging to other individuals, Dr. Koch con- 

 structed an enormous osteological monster, and named it 



* "American Naturalist," Vol. V. 



