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Hippopotamus; from cave near Palermo; molar tooth; two-thirds of natural size. Horse. Recent. a. Grinding surface, two-thirds natural size. b. Deer. Grinding surface. b. Ox. Ox, common, from shell-marl, Forfarshire; true molar, upper jaw; two-thirds natural size. Recent. c. Grinding surface. d. Bear. a. Molar of left side, upper jaw; one-third of natural size. Tiger. c.
In fact, the old river bed, in which bones of the mastodon occur, holds the same position relatively to the boulder formation as the strata of shell-marl and bog-earth with bones of mastodon, so frequent in the State of New York, bear to the glacial drift, and all may be of contemporaneous date.
That in the United States the Mastodon giganteus was very abundant after the drift period, is evident from the fact that entire skeletons of this animal are met with in bogs and lacustrine deposits occupying hollows in the glacial drift. They sometimes occur in the bottom even of small ponds recently drained by the agriculturist for the sake of the shell-marl.
The overlying strata were marine, containing sea-shells of living species, and bones of whales, besides the remains of several living species of mammalia. Other examples of works of art, such as stone hatchets, canoes, and ships, buried in ancient river-beds in England, and in peat and shell-marl, I have mentioned in my work before cited.
In the state of New York, the mastodon is not unfrequently met with in bogs and lacustrine deposits formed in hollows in the drift, and therefore, in a geological position, much resembling that of Recent peat and shell-marl in the British Isles, Denmark, or the valley of the Somme, as before described.
Fossil shells were also much sought after; we have alluded to those from Champagne found in Belgium; others from the shell-marl of Touraine and Anjou had been taken into the caves of Perigord, whilst sea-urchins from the cretaceous strata of the south of France were found in a prehistoric station of Auvergne, and M. Massenat picked up at Laugerie-Basse two specimens of a species not met with anywhere but in the Eocene deposits of the isle of Wight.
The stems, as well as the seed-vessels, of these plants occur both in modern shell-marl and in ancient fresh-water formations. They are generally composed of a large central tube surrounded by smaller ones; the whole stem being divided at certain intervals by transverse partitions or joints.
I cannot help suspecting that many tusks and teeth of the mammoth, said to have been found in peat, may be as spurious as are the horns of the rhinoceros cited more than once in the "Memoirs of the Wernerian Society" as having been obtained from shell-marl in Forfarshire and other Scotch counties; yet, between the period when the mammoth was most abundant and that when it died out, there must have elapsed a long interval of ages when it was growing more and more scarce; and we may expect to find occasional stragglers buried in deposits long subsequent in date to others, until at last we may succeed in tracing a passage from the Pleistocene to the Recent fauna, by geological monuments, which will fill up the gap before alluded to as separating the era of the flint tools of Amiens and Abbeville from that of the peat of the valley of the Somme.
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