Show How a Mastodon was Buried The burialplace of this great beast is to me of intense Interest The body lay on its side on a hard sand bottom the upper parts being surrounded and but thinly covered with muck or vegetable peat I am satisfied that it died on the dry bank of an ancient stream Now came a singular discovery which served as a key to the difficulty Lying on the skeleton at different parts were the sticks or heart remains re-mains of red cedars Juniperus Virginiana they were beaver logs Here a singular piece of experience ex-perience cameto myaidI bad quite recently discovered add studied the details of two fossil beaver dams but two miles west of this place and the physical features of this mastodons buryingplace were in all respects indicative of a former beaverdam In fact no other hypothesis hy-pothesis could account for these sticks with others of different woods which have been exhumed in this meadow It is observable that a pond made by beavers has in time its meadow as a natural conse auence and that after the pond is deserted by these animals the dam breaks down slowly and as the pond area decreases the swamp area in creases and a growth ofgvegetation sets in which becomes the peatbog afterward the meadow The place where the mastodon lay in course of time became covered by the waters of the pond for beavers keep lengthening length-ening their dam increase thearea of the pond and only stop so doing when the natural opportunities of the situation are exhausted Of course it was only the skeleton of the beast which was buried and the bones might have been there long before peatgrowth began over them This explains the decomposition decompo-sition of the bones for peat is antiseptic anti-septic and they should have been preserved but it was a slow burial and slow decay had long before set in Popular Science Monthly for January |