Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/372

352 the European Elephas primigenius, although the latter also occurs fossil in the United States and Canada, and abounds, as I learn from Sir John Richardson, in latitudes farther north than those to which the mastodon has been traced. In the state of New York, the mastodon is not unfrequently met with in bogs and lacustrine deposits formed in hollows in the drift, and therefore, in a geological position, much resembling that of recent peat and shell-marl in the British Isles, Denmark, or the Valley of the Somme, as before described. Sometimes entire skeletons have been discovered within a few feet of the surface, in peaty earth at the bottom of small ponds, which the agriculturists had drained. The shells in these cases belong to freshwater genera, such as Limnea, Physa, Planorbis, Cyclas, and others, differing from European species, but the same as those now proper to ponds and lakes in the same parts of America.

I have elsewhere given an account of several of these localities which I visited in 1842, and can state that they certainly have a more modern aspect than almost all the European deposits in which remains of the mammoth occur, although a few instances are cited of Elephas primigenius having been dug out of peat in Great Britain. Thus I was shown a mammoth's tooth in the museum at Torquay, in Devonshire, which is believed to have been dredged up from a deposit of vegetable matter now partially submerged beneath the sea. A more elevated part of the same peaty formation constitutes the bottom of the valley in which Tor Abbey stands. This individual elephant must certainly have been of more modern date than his fellows found fossil in the gravel of the Brixham cave, before described (p. 100), for it flourished when the physical geography of Devonshire, unlike that of the cave period, was almost identical with that now established.