On digging into these morasses you generally have to remove from one to two feet of peat or turf; you then enter on a stratum, from one to two feet thick, of what the farmers call the yellow marle, composed of vegetable earth intermixed with long yellow roots; next the grey marle, which resembles wet ashes, to the further depth of two feet; and finally a bed of decayed shells, which they call shell-marle, the upper surface of which forms a horizontal line across the morass, consequently it is thicker in the center than at the edges; under this, forming the bottom of the pond or morass, is found gravel and slate covering a thick stratum of clay. It was in the white and yellow marle the bones were generally found; those in the white in the highest preservation, less so in the grey; and where an end happened to rise into the yellow stratum it was proportionally decayed: One cause of this must have been the accession of air when the springs in dry seasons were low. The grey marle, in which most of the bones lay, by analysis was found to contain seventy-three parts in the hundred of lime: when dried in the sun it cracks into thin horizontal laminæ, and becomes extremely light, as hard as baked clay, and brittle; in this state it burns with a bright flame for a long while, and instead of leaving ashes, it remains a strong black coal, apparently well adapted to the purposes of the arts. These various strata are the production of a long succession of ages, and, in my opinion, have been formed over the bones. In two of the morasses there was not depth sufficient to have bemired an animal of such magnitude and strength; and in the third the bones were lying near the sloping edge, from which some of them had already been washed farther in: The animals have either died or been destroyed generally over the country, and only in these situations have been preserved; or they have sought these cool places to die in; or perhaps both. No calculation can be made of the length of time necessary to have formed these morasses, although we are certain that, as in fifty years past scarcely any change appears, it must have been proportionally slower in the commencement; and a period has elapsed in which all accounts of this animal have dwindled into oblivion, except a confused Indian tradition.