effigies, the identity of which must be
guessed, that the resemblance is of the most vague and general kind, the
figure simulating the elephant no more closely than any one of a score
or more mounds in Wisconsin, except in one important particular, viz,
the head has a prolongation or snout-like appendage, which is its chief,
in fact its only real, elephantine character. If this appendage is too
long for the snout of any other known animal, it is certainly too short
for the trunk of a mastodon. Still, so far as this one character goes,
it is doubtless true that it is more suggestive of the mastodon than of
any other animal. No hint is afforded of tusks, ears, or tail, and were
it not for the snout the animal effigy might readily be called a bear,
it nearly resembling in its general make-up many of the so-called bear
mounds figured by Squier and Davis from this same county in Wisconsin.
The latter, too, are of the same gigantic size and proportions.

If it can safely be assumed that an animal effigy without tusks, without
ears, and without a tail was really intended to represent a mastodon, it
would be stretching imagination but a step farther to call all the
large-bodied, heavy-limbed animal effigies hitherto named bears,
mastodons, attributing the lack of trunks, as well as ears, tusks, and
tails, to inattention to slight details on the part of the mound artist.

It is true that one bit of good, positive proof is worth many of a
negative character. But here the one positive resemblance, the trunk of
the supposed elephant, falls far short of an exact imitation, and, as
the other features necessary to a good likeness of a mastodon are wholly
wanting, is not this an instance where the negative proof should be held
sufficient to largely outweigh the positive?

In connection with this question the fact should not be overlooked that,
among the great number of animal effigies in Wisconsin and elsewhere,
this is the only one which even thus remotely suggests the mastodon. As
the Mound Builders were in the habit of repeating the same animal form
again and again, not only in the same but in widely distant localities,
why, if this was really intended for a mastodon, are there no others
like it? It cannot be doubted that the size and extraordinary features
of this monster among mammals would have prevented it being overlooked
by the Mound-Builders when so many animals of inferior interest engaged
their attention. The fact that th