semi-savage nations present us with
orally-preserved accounts of very remote objects or actions, we look, as
a matter of course, for a considerable element of the wild, and
extravagant, and absurd in them. If we found nothing but what was
reasonable, and consistent, and intelligible, we should say in a moment,
this account cannot have been transmitted very far. The question, in the
case before us, is not, we must remember, the precise habits and
instincts of the Mastodon, but whether the Indians knew anything at all
of the Mastodon having ever been a living animal. Now, as I have
observed, they had. M. Fabri, a French officer who had served in Canada,
informed Buffon that the Red men spoke of the great bones which lay
scattered in various parts of that region as having belonged to an
animal which, after their oriental style, they named _Le Pere aux
B{oe}ufs_. The Shawnee Indians believed that with these enormous animals
there existed men of proportionate development, and that the Great Being
destroyed both with thunderbolts. Those of Virginia stated that, as a
troop of these terrible quadrupeds were destroying the deer, the bisons,
and the other animals created for the use of the Indians, the Great Man
slew them all with His thunder, except the big bull, who, nothing
daunted, presented his enormous forehead to the bolts, and shook them
off as they fell, till, being at last wounded in the side, he fled
towards the great lakes, where he is to this day.

Evidence of the comparatively-recent entombment of these remains exists,
however, of another character. They do not in general appear to have
been rolled, but to have lived where they are now found; in some
instances, as along the Great Osage River, being imbedded in a vertical
position, as if the animals had been suddenly bogged in the swampy soil.
Nor is there any great accumulation of earth upon them generally. All
along the edges of that great saline morass called, from the abundance
of these animal relics, Big Bone Lick, and on the borders, the skeletons
are found sunk in the soft earth, many of them not more than a yard or
two below the surface, and some even scarcely covered. With them are
found in large numbers the bones of the existing bison, the wapiti-stag,
and other herbivores, which still throng to the same place, for the same
reasons, and meet the same fate.

Comparative anatomy determines, from the structure of the bones of the
head in the Mastodon, that it