Constitutional Whig

MISCELLANEOUS.

On the Cranium of the Mastodon now exhibiting from Kentucky.

To the Editors of the Courier & Enquirer.

Gentlemen—One of the most interesting objects of attraction in our city, is the collection of fossil bones of the Mastodon, (commonly called the Mammoth,) and other extinct animals, now exhibiting at the corner of Pearl st. and Broadway. This collection is as extraordinary, by the great number of bones of which it consists, as by the excellent preservation in which they are found. The Lyceum of Natural History has made a valuable report upon them, which has been published in part, and will shortly appear entire in Silliman's Journal. To that report, I will take the liberty to superadd some reflections more in detail upon one of the pieces of the collection, which, from the new light it throws upon a subject hitherto enveloped in mystery, and deemed one of the greatest desiderata in Zoology, will be estimated not only by our naturalists here, but particularly by those of Europe, one of the most important discoveries ever made in this department of knowledge. I mean the head of the Mastodon or Mammoth, which, in all the exhumations of this animal that have heretofore been made, has always by some unaccountable fatality, been found wanting or decayed into fragments, until this accidental discovery in Kentucky of the entire cranium of the animal. By which important fact, we shall at last be enabled to accomplish the wish so much desired by Cuvier, the great father of Fossil Zoology, of ascertaining the precise position which this quondam native and king of our forests, ought to occupy in the nomenclature of animals. The gap will now be filled up, and we shall know with accuracy to what family and species he belongs, what were his habits, his character and peculiarities. For by the fixed relations of compatibility which constitute the governing principles and laws of the animal organization, (and to the discovery of which the world is as much indebted to the immortal Cuvier as to Kepler and Newton for those of the heavenly bodies,) we are enabled, from an examination of the bony structure, to arrive at the nature of the animal, with as much exactitude as by the demonstration of a mathematical theorem.

It may be well imagined therefore, with what thrilling interest the news of this discovery will be received in the Museums and Schools of Paris, where the subject has excited so much discussion among the savans of that Capital.

In the year 1819, two members of the Lyceum of Natural History of this city, consisting of the then President, Dr. Mitchill, and Dr. P. S. Townsend, had the good fortune to discover the remains of a skeleton of one of these animals at Chester, near Goshen, Orange county, in this state. They were brought to the city and deposited in the cabinet of the Lyceum, where they now are. Besides the enormous tusks and other bones, all of which lay imbedded upon a mass of blue clay, (as was the case with those now exhibiting from Kentucky) about six feet below the green sward of the bog meadow in which the discovery was made, there was found near the roots of the tusks, a thin plate of bone, of a circular shape, evidently belonging to the head, but every other vestige of the cranium had disappeared. The writer of this (who was one of the above named members of the Lyceum who made the discovery in 1819) taking this plate of bone for a guide, sketched an outline of the supposed shape of the head of the animal, which outline, then deemed quite conjectural and speculative, is now demonstrated to have been almost the identical and true shape of the long lost cranium of the Mastodon. This is, of a wedge-shape formation, quite and totally unlike the conical head of the Elephant, to which the Mammoth or Mastodon had always been supposed, from the similarity of other bones, to bear a much closer resemblance than is now found to be the fact. This sketch, therefore, the original of which may be found in the archives of the Lyceum, and an engraving of which was inserted in Mitchill's edition of Cuvier's Theory of the Earth, published at the time in this city, was the first gleam of light thrown upon this subject, now no longer an enigma, but unravelled of all its perplexities. In that same sketch will also be seen the teeth of the upper jaw, placed apparently upon, and sitting in, the root of the tusks. This, at the time, was also thought somewhat gratuitous.

Now this curious phenomenon is also explained by the cranium from Kentucky, for in the Chester Mastodon the sockets or alveolar processes of the tusks (for the tusks are nothing more than the cuspidati or eye-teeth lengthened,) forming a cylindrical shell enveloping the roots of the tusks, were entirely decayed, so that the roots or fangs of the upper teeth actually had the appearance of being inserted into the roots of the tusks. By inspecting the Kentucky head it will be perceived that the fangs of the upper teeth do, in reality, run into the sockets of the tusks in such manner as to be in a measure blended with or incorporated with their substance.

The plate of bone which forms the flat superior surface of the head of this extraordinary animal was, as is now seen by the Kentucky specimen, the forehead, or os frontis, and its union posteriorly with the parietal bones, and occiput almost at a right angle, strikingly reminds one of the head of the ox, to which head it is certainly more analogous than any other animal we are acquainted with, known or extinct. This fact recalls to mind an ingenious observation made at the time by Mr. Mitchill, deduced from the great length and curvature of the tusks and from the mammelolar formation of the teeth (so distinctive a peculiarity of the Mastodon, as contrasted with the Elephant family.) that the Mastodon was essentially a browsing animal like the ox, and that the tusk performed, in respect to the branches of trees and bushes, the function of arms while the conical and large projecting processes of the teeth were particularly intended to masticate food of this description, therein differing vastly from the slightly furrowed surface of the teeth of the Elephant, and which were undoubtedly constructed mainly for graminivorous purposes.

It may be proper here to note that the conical processes of the teeth, which form so remarkable a peculiarity of the Mastodon, was the circumstance which puzzled naturalists in placing it alongside the Elephant, and induced Cuvier at once to put this animal into a new genus by itself, leaving the experiment to be justified by future researches, as it now has been by this Kentucky cranium. Below the forehead, and immediately above and between the bifurcation of the tusks, are the two openings or nostrils, upon which without doubt was inserted the proboscis or trunk. These openings go deep and backward, and at right angles, almost to the frontal plate, and considering the spongy nature of the bones of which they are formed, are in a remarkable state of preservation. They are large enough to admit the insertion of the wrist. The openings in front of the orbits of the sockets of the eyes, and through which passed the supra-orbital nerve, so small in most animals as to be unnoticed, are here an inch and more in diameter, and will give some notion of the colossal structure of the anatomy of this gigantic wanderer of our forests.

It is to be furthermore mentioned, in respect to the characteristic features of the organization of the Mammoth or Mastodon, that the tusks were always observed to be of infinitely greater length and thickness than they ever attain in the oldest Elephant, and quite disproportionate in size to those of all other animals; which furnished always a well-grounded reason to believe that the Mastodon was of right a distinct family by himself. Below the nares or nostrial openings it may be added is a deep long fissure or indentation, doubtless the place where was inserted the muscle that moved the proboscis or trunk. The passage through the occiput or back part of the head into the spine, where the spinal marrow comes out from the brain, is much larger than the diameter of the arm.

It would appear therefore, that the Mastodon, (properly so named from the peculiarity of the teeth before spoken of, like some of the living incongruous combinations seen in the animals of New Holland,) was, in respect to his organs and formation, a compound, blending in many particulars the peculiarities of the ox and the elephant, between which families seems to be his natural position in Zoology. The head from Kentucky now exhibiting here, and which has given rise to this communication, is that of an individual about two-thirds grown, or perhaps belonging to a female, which consideration is strengthened by the delicate and slender form of the tusks.

A thousand curious associations present themselves to the mind, when we go back to the period certainly not very remote, (as is seen by the fresh and sound state of these bones, when this, now extinct monster, bounded, as the Indian tradition (now proved no legendary or fabulous tale,) expresses it, over the forests of this continent. What that wondrous change was in the superficial surface of the earth, (for from the shallow depths of the graves where they are embedded, this change could only have been superficial,) which overwhelmed and put out of existence upon that land, where they were wont to roam as undisputed masters, the entire race of these animals, we do not attempt to divine. The Mitchillian hypothesis however, has ingenuity enough to recommend it to serve as a substitute, until a better is invented. The ruptures through different chains of mountains in our country, that of the Cumberland in Tennessee, the Shenandoah in Virginia, the gap of the Delaware, the passage of the St. Lawrence, and the yet more extraordinary excavation of the Hudson River through the Highlands, all indicate the occurrence at no distant epoch (perhaps some 1500 years since) of a mighty revolution upon the earth's exterior, on this continent, which we have plausible reasons to believe, consisted in the breaking down and through these mountain barriers of some great inland ocean, the remains of whose waters covered our western states, and finally subsided into the basins which form our present chain of lakes, still so spacious in circumference and depth, as to be justly denominated the inland seas of North America.

But then the question comes back to us, how the Elephant, whose bones are found entombed in the same depositories as the Mastodon, could have endured the rigorous climate, the cold and boisterous winds, and the driving snows and sleets of our winter, so different from the warm and balmy regions where he is now known to dwell and prefer for his residence. We can imagine that the Mastodon was a hardier animal and could endure these severities; and we also know the Elephant may be acclimated to less genial latitudes than India or Africa: But how can we bring ourselves to the belief that the existence of this vast mass of waters upon our land had not the tendency to make our climate colder even than it is in our day, since we even now ascribe all its tempestuousness to the proximity of those very lakes which are the remains of that ocean!

But I am plunging into a sea of speculation too deep and wide to be mingled up with the observations which form the subject matter of this communication, and which I flatter myself will be thought to be founded upon data now too well established to be contested.

New York, June 14, 1831.

Measurement of the head.—Greatest length from the angle of the frontal and parietal bones to the anterior projection of the jaw bones which form the upper surface of the alveolar processes or sockets of the tusks—3 feet.

Greatest breadth over the nares or nostrils, i.e. between the outer or orbital angles of the frontal bones at the base of the brain—22 inches.

Greatest depth of cranium from the union of the frontal and parietal bones posteriorly to the foramen magnum of the occipital bone, i. e. from the top of the head to the beginning of the spine—20 inches.

T.