Page:A Treatise on Geology, volume 2.djvu/83

 CHAP. VI. under the peat of Lancashire; works of human art being also mentioned; and bones and antlers of the great extinct elk of Ireland occur in many of the peaty and marly Deposits of Ireland, the Isle of Man, Lancashire, and Yorkshire.

Another example of peat deposits connected with shell marls, which contain quadrupeds of the same races as those usually supposed to characterise the diluvial deposits, occurs at Wittgendorf, near Sprottau (Silesia). Here, according to Meyer (Palæologica), below a thin bed of drifted sand and pebbles, in the lower parts of a peat deposit, 6 to 8 feet thick, and, also in marls below, lie bones of Elephas primigenius, oxen, deer, and fish, with cyclostomæ. In these cases, the bones and shells show no sign of abrasion.

If we turn to America, and take as an example the circumstances which accompany the bones of the great mastodon, the inference previously adopted as to the age of the peat deposits is confirmed; for these certainly date from an epoch subsequent to the dispersion of diluvial detritus. But, as regards the animal remains, we learn that a tooth of the mastodon occurred at Fort M'Henry, near Baltimore, below "diluvium;" and it is well known that, at Big Bone Lick and in New Jersey, and elsewhere, nearly complete skeletons of Mastodon giganteus occur in peat and shelly marls of comparatively recent date, along with extinct and living species of oxen and deer.

"From all the facts before me," observes Professor Rogers, in his Report to the British Association, 1834, on the geology of North America, "I have little hesitation in giving my opinion, that the extinct gigantic animals of this continent, the mastodon, elephant, megalonyx, megatherium, fossil bos, and fossil cervus, lived down to a comparatively recent period, and that some of them were in existence so long ago as the era anterior to that which covered the greater part of this continent with diluvium."

The conclusion here presented may very probably, or