HISTORICAL SKETCH. 6 



indebted for many facts relating to this subject, and whose residence is 

 situated in the region between these two rivers, informs us that a fine 

 Mastodon vertebra, in perfect preservation, was found at New Britain, ten 

 miles south of Hartford, in cutting a small mill-canal ; also two fine teeth, 

 white, dry, and crumbly, were turned up in digging the Farmington Canal 

 in Cheshire, about twelve or thirteen miles north of New Haven. These 

 latter, so far as we know, are the only Mastodon bones which have been 

 found in New England. 



The great river which separates New York from New England might 

 have served as a partial barrier to their passage into the Eastern States. 

 The climate of the latter was perhaps less desirable to them than the 

 milder regions of the South and "West; yet as Canada, still further north, 

 presents a number of their relics, climate alone could not have repelled 

 them from the East. Some peculiarity in the soil, or productions of this 

 section of the country, were probably uncongenial to the Mastodon consti- 

 tution ; or perhaps, at the period in which this race existed, the geo- 

 graphical relation of New England to the continent might have varied 

 from the present, by the interposition of an arm of the sea too wide to be 

 readily crossed. 



