of uniting
tie between creatures still associated in the human mind, from the
circumstance of their massive proportions, as the greatest that swim the
sea or walk the land,--the whale and the elephant. The Mastodon, an
elephantoid animal, also furnished, like the elephant, with tusks and
trunk, but marked by certain peculiarities which constitute it a
different genus, seems in Europe to have been contemporary with the
Dinotherium; but in North America (the scene of its greatest numerical
development) it appears to belong to a later age. In height it did not
surpass the African elephant, but it considerably exceeded it in
length,--a specimen which could not have stood above twelve feet high
indicating a length of about twenty-five feet: it had what the elephants
want,--tusks fixed in its lower jaw, which the males retained through
life, but the females lost when young; its limbs were proportionally
shorter, but more massive, and its abdomen more elongated and slim; its
grinder teeth too, some of which have been known to weigh from seventeen
to twenty pounds, and their cusps elevated into great mammae-like
protuberances, to which the creature owes its name, and wholly differ in
their proportions and outline from the grinders of the elephant. The
much greater remoteness of the mastodonic period in Europe than in
America is a circumstance worthy of notice, as it is one of many facts
that seem to indicate a general transposition of at least the later
geologic ages on the opposite sides of the Atlantic. Groups of
corresponding character on the eastern and western shores of this great
ocean were not contemporaneous in time. It has been repeatedly
remarked, that the existing plants and trees of the United States, with
not a few of its fishes and reptiles, bear in their forms and
construction the marks of a much greater antiquity than those of Europe.
The geologist who sets himself to discover similar types on the eastern
side of the Atlantic would have to seek for them among the deposits of
the later Tertiaries. North America seems to be still passing through
its later Tertiary ages; and it appears to be a consequence of this
curious transposition, that while in Europe the mastodonic period is
removed by two great geologic eras from the present time, it is removed
from it in America by only one. Even in America, however, that period
lies far beyond the reach of human tradition,--a fact borne out by the
pseudo-traditions retaile