cent
bringing to light in Iowa of two pipes carved in the semblance of the
same animal, as well as a tablet showing two figures asserted by some
archaeologists to have been intended for the same animal.

Although both the mound and pipes have been referred in turn to the
peccary, the tapir, and the armadillo, it is safe to exclude these
animals from consideration. It is indeed perhaps more likely that the
ancient inhabitants of the Upper Mississippi Valley were autoptically
acquainted with the mastodon than with either of the above-named
animals, owing to their southern habitat.

Referring to the possibility that the mastodon was known to the
Mound-Builders, it is impossible to fix with any degree of precision the
time of its disappearance from among living animals. Mastodon bones have
been exhumed from peat beds in this country at a depth which, so far as
is proved by the rate of deposition, implies that the animal may have
been alive within five hundred years. The extinction of the mastodon,
geologically speaking, was certainly a very recent event, and, as an
antiquity of upwards of a thousand or more years has been assigned to
some of the mounds, it is entirely within the possibilities that this
animal was living at the time these were thrown up, granting even that
the time of their erection has been overestimated. It must be admitted,
therefore, that there are no inherent absurdities in the belief that the
Mound-Builders were acquainted with the mastodon. Granting that they may
have been acquainted with the animal, the question arises, what proof is
there that they actually were? The answer to this question made by
certain archaeologists is--the Elephant Mound, of Wisconsin.

[Illustration: Fig. 27.--The Elephant Mound, Grant County,
Wisconsin.]

Recalling the fact that among the animal mounds many nondescript shapes
occur which cannot be identified at all, and as many others which have
been called after the animals they appear to most nearly resemble, carry
out their peculiarities only in the most vague and general way, it is a
little difficult to understand the confidence with which this effigy has
been asserted to represent the mastodon; for the mound (a copy of which
as figured in the Smithsonian Annual Report for 1872 is here given) can
by no means be said to closely represent the shape, proportions, and
peculiarities of the animal whose name it bears. In fact, it is true of
this, as of so many other of the