930 



NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



debris filling a great pothole in the Hudson river shales, 

 exposed in digging the foundations for the Harmony 

 (Mastodon) mills in Cohoes. This pothole was actually a 

 double one, formed by breaking down the wall between 

 two adjoining, and was the largest of many that lay above 

 the flood plain of the present Mohawk river. Their origin 

 was ascribed by Hall to the action of water flowing 

 through crevasses in the glacial sheet. A portion of the 

 skeleton referred to was found in a smaller pothole 60 feet 

 away and 20 feet higher than the larger. After several 

 thousand loads of muck with branches of trees had been 

 removed, the first bones were found. Continued excava- 

 tion exposed the major part of the skeleton, lying on a 

 bed of clay, broken slate, gravel and waterworn pebbles 

 and covered with vegetable soil. The gravel beneath was 

 penetrated by rods to a depth of 10 feet without striking 

 rock. 



Of the bones most of the larger were obtained, but 

 many small ones were lost. Numerically reckoned, 84 

 bones were found, 189 were not. 



Professor Hall regarded this skeleton as derived from a 

 carcass which had been frozen into the glacial ice and 

 caught in these subglacial potholes; but, when we reckon 

 the chances of a carcass being thus picked up by the ice 

 sheet and of this chance carcass being caught in a pot- 

 hole, we imply, either, that englacial carcasses were not 

 infrequent or that the rock surfaces traversed by the ice 

 were dotted with potholes. The latter proposition is not 

 generally true, the former, judged by our knowledge of 

 the mastodon, not probable. This carcass more probably 

 belongs to the period of the swamps by which this pot- 

 hole area was covered after the fall of the postglacial 

 waters. 



This skeleton is of a relatively small animal and is 

 mounted in the State Museum. 



Wayne county 



Macedon 



A few teeth in L'niversitv of Rochester Museum. H. L. 

 Faircliild 



