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ments of branches of trees found occupying the place of 
the stomach of a skeleton of the Mastodon, exhumed on 
Schooley Mountain. Professor Gray stated that the wood 
consisted of branchlets of one, two, or three years old, 
broken uniformly into bits of half an inch or more in 
length, with only now and then a trace of the bark remain- 
ing. The wood was not fossilised, and but slightly decayed, 
and from its general appearance he inferred it belonged to 
some coniferous tree, probably a kind of spruce. This 
supposition he subsequently confirmed by the examination 
of thin slices under the microscope, which exhibited beauti- 
fully and distinctly the circular disks that characterise 
coniferous wood, and perfectly agreed with similar portions 
from the hemlock spruce, a tree still common in the 
district. The great interest of this announcement of 
Professor Gray's, consists in his being able to ascertain 
what plants the Mastodon had actually last been feeding 
upon.* 
The fine skeleton of the Mastodon now in the British 
Museum, was found in the State of Missouri, imbedded in 
a brown sandy deposit full of vegetables, amongst which 
could be recognised the cypress, tropical cane, swamp 
moss, and palmetto ; and Mr. Koch, the late proprietor 
and discoverer, personally assured Dr. Mantell that an 
Indian flint arrowhead was found beneath the leg bones, 
and similar weapons were imbedded in the same soil, 
which he took out with his own hands. f 
Sir Charles Lyell, in his travels in America, states that 
he saw at Genisco the skull, tusks, and vertebrae of a 
Mastodon, dug out of a bed of shell marl and sand, the 
shells being all existing fresh water and land species, now 
common in that district ;t and it is evident, he adds, that 
* Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, xliii, p. 184. f Mantell's Fossils in the 
British Museum, 473. $ Travels in North America, vol. i., p. 55. 
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