'278 ON THE l'OSSIL BONES OF PACHYDERMATOUS QUADRUPEDS. 



it by the shape of its molars, than do those of the mammoth"*, (mean- 

 ing the mastodon). 



These fossils are most frequently found in Kentucky and along the 

 banks of the Ohio, in those places, denominated licks, because the 

 wild beasts are in the habit of resorting thither, to drink the brackish 

 waters with which they abound. Of these, the most celebrated for the 

 immense heap of bones which were found there, to which we shall 

 recur in the chapter treating of mastodons, is known to geographers 

 under the appellation of bik-bone-lick. It was thoroughly explored 

 in 1807, by Governor Clarke, on his return from his famous expedition 

 to the Pacific Ocean, and at the instance of Mr. Jefferson, who was 

 then President of the United States. 



The bones, found in great quantities by Clarke, were carefully trans- 

 ported to Washington, where they arrived in March, 1808. Mr. 

 Jefferson divided them into three portions. He gave one to the 

 Museum of the Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, another to the 

 French Institute, which has long ranked that great man among its 

 honorary fellows, and the third he reserved for himself. The bones 

 thus presented by him to the Institute, are now deposited in the 

 Museum of Natural History. Among them are three fine strongly 

 characterised jaws of elephants, of which I shall give an engraving 

 and a description f. 



Mr. Mitchell, from whom I borrow the details of this discovery, 

 gives the drawing of the real jaw of an elephant found at Middleton, in 

 the county of Monmouth, which is also in the province of Kentucky; 

 and that of another from the eastern shore of the bay of the Chesapeak, 

 in the state of Maryland J. 



I am not quite certain whether or not this is the jaw of which the 

 same author speaks as having been found in Queen Ann's county, on 

 the eastern side of Maryland. 



According to the account of M. Rembrandt Peale, those Kentucky 

 jaws, similar in every respect to those of Siberia, were few in number, 

 in an advanced stage of deconrposition, and unaccompanied by other 

 bones, with the exception of a few tusks ; whence that excellent artist 

 concludes, that the destruction of the elephant in Ameiica must have 

 been prior to that of the mastodon ; or else, that the spoils of the former 

 must have been carried from some other quarter by some revolution §. 



From the testimony of a letter, written by John Stranger, and in- 

 serted in the American Monthly Magazine, printed at New York, 

 in May, 1818, there were found in the county of Wythe, near 

 the river Ihanhawa, in Virginia, six feet below the surface, in a marshy 

 spot, where saline efflorescences had discovered themselves, large 

 bones and some teeth with transverse sides — consequently those of 



* Letter of Mr. Barton to M. Lacepfede, printed in the Philoshphical Magazine 

 of Tilloch, July, 1805, p. 98. 



-f This account is extracted from the Appendix with which Mr. Samuel Mitchell, 

 professor at New York, has enriched the English translation of my Preliminary Dis- 

 course, printed in America in 1S18, p. 361. 



% Mitchell, ibid. 



§ Historical Disquisition oa the Mammoth, p. 68. 



