438 
TROPICAL NATURE 
VIII 
Man Coeval with Extinct Mammalia 
We next come to remains of man or his works found in 
association with the bones of extinct mammalia. The great 
mastodon skeleton in the British Museum found by Dr. Koch 
in the Osage valley, Missouri, had stone arrow-heads and 
charcoal found near it, but the fact was at the time received 
with the same incredulity as all other evidences of the anti- 
quity of man. This animal was found at a depth of twenty 
feet, under seven alternate layers of loam, gravel, clay, and 
peat, with a forest of old trees on the surface, and one of the 
arrow-heads lay under the thigh-bone of the mastodon and 
in contact with it. About the same date (1859) Dr. Holmes 
communicated to the Philadelphia Academy of Natural 
Sciences his discovery of fragments of pottery in connection 
with bones of the mastodon and megatherium on the Ashley 
river of South Carolina. 
Such cases as these remove all improbability from the 
celebrated Natchez man, a portion of a human pelvis from 
the loess of” the Mississippi, which contains bones of the 
mastodon, megalonyx, horse, bison, and other extinct animals. 
This bone was stated by Sir Charles Lyell “to be quite in 
the same state of preservation and of the same black colour 
as the other fossils.” Dr. Joseph Leidy agrees with this 
statement, yet he and Professor C. G. Forshey maintain that 
it is “more probable” that the human bone fell down the 
cliff from some Indian grave near the surface. Sir Charles 
Lyell well remarks that “ had the bone belonged to any other 
recent mammal, such a theory would never have been resorted 
to.” The admitted identity of the state of preservation and 
appearance of the human and animal bones is certainly not 
consistent with the view that the one is recent, the other 
ancient ; the one artificially buried near the surface, the other 
in a natural deposit thirty feet below the surface. 
Of a similar character to the above is the basket-work mat 
found in a rock-salt deposit fifteen to twenty feet below the 
surface in Petit Anse island, Louisiana, two feet above which 
were fragments of tusks and bones of an elephant. The salt 
is said to be very pure, extending over an area of 5000 acres, 
and the formation of such a deposit requires a considerable 
