Mr. Collinson, Member of the Royal Society, in a letter on this subject to M. Buffon[2], after describing the situation of the salt lick on the Ohio, where an amazing number of bones of the elephant, as he imagined them to be, were found, together with teeth totally unlike those of the elephant, concludes thus: “But the large teeth which I send you, Sir, were found with those tusks or defences; others yet larger than these shew, nay demonstrate, that they did not belong to elephants. How shall we reconcile this paradox? May we not suppose that there existed formerly a large animal with the tusks of the elephant and the grinders of the hippopotamus? For these large grinders are very different from those of the elephant. Mr. Croghan thinks, from the great number of this kind of teeth, that is, the tusks and grinders which he saw in that place, that there had been at least thirty of these animals; yet the elephant never was known in America, and probably could not have been carried there from Asia: the impossibility that they could have lived there, owing to the severity of the winters, and where, notwithstanding such a quantity of their bones is found, is a paradox which we leave to your eminent wisdom to solve.” This determination M. Buffon gives us in the following terms, although in direct contradiction to those passages in which he labours to prove that the bones found in Siberia and America were bones of the elephant: “Thus every thing leads us to believe that this ancient species, which must be regarded as the first and largest of terrestrial animals, has not existed since the earliest times, and is totally unknown to us; for an animal whose species was larger than that of the elephant, could hide itself in no part of the earth so as to remain unknown; besides, it is evident from the form of these teeth alone, from their enamel and the disposition of their roots, that they bear no resemblance to the _cachelots_, or other cetaceous animals, and that they really belonged to a terrestrial animal whose species approached that of the hippopotamus more than any other.” [Footnote 2: Buffon, Tome XIII. Notes justificative, Page 224.] The world is now in possession of two undisputed skeletons of this animal, found in such situations as leave no room for conjecture; each skeleton being dug up in a separate place, without any intermixture of foreign bones, and each bone exactly adapted to its corresponding points of articulation. One of these skeletons is erected as a permanent establishment at the Museum, Philadelphia; the other I have brought with me, with an intention to travel through Europe, beginning with the metropolis of England. I shall here give a short account of the place and manner of finding these.