Many a mastodon has come to light since the time of Koch, for while it is commonly supposed that remains of the animal are great rarities, as a matter of fact they are quite common, and it may safely be said that during the seasons of ditching, draining, and well-digging not a week passes without one or more mastodons being unearthed. Not that these are complete skeletons, very far from it, the majority of finds are scattered teeth, crumbling tusks, or massive leg-bones, but still the mastodon is far commoner in the museums of this country than is the African elephant, for at the present date there are eleven of the former to one of the latter, the single skeleton of African elephant being that of Jumbo in the American Museum of Natural History. If one may judge by the abundance of bones, mastodons must have been very numerous in some favored localities such as parts of Michigan, Florida, and Missouri and about Big Bone Lick, Ky. Perhaps the most noteworthy of all deposits is that at Kimmswick, about twenty miles south of St. Louis, where in a limited area Mr. L. W. Beehler has exhumed bones representing several hundred individuals, varying in size from a mere baby mastodon up to the great tusker whose wornout teeth proclaim that he had reached the limit of even mastodonic old age. The spot where this remarkable deposit was found is at the foot of a bluff near the junction of two little streams, and it seems probable that in the days when these were larger the spring floods swept down the bodies of animals that had perished during the winter to ground in an eddy beneath the bluff. Or as the place abounds in springs of sulphur and salt water it may be that this was where the animals assembled during cold weather, just as the moas are believed to have gathered in the swamps of New Zealand, and here the weaker died and left their bones. The mastodon must have looked very much like any other elephant, though a little shorter in the legs and somewhat more heavily built than either of the living species, while the head was a trifle flatter and the jaw decidedly longer. The tusks are a variable quantity, sometimes merely bowing outwards, often curving upwards to form a half circle; they were never so long as the largest mammoth tusks, but to make up for this they were a shade stouter for their length. As the mastodon ranged well to the north it is fair to suppose that he may have been covered with long hair, a supposition that seems to be borne out by the discovery, noted by Rembrandt Peale, of a mass of long, coarse, woolly hair buried in one of the swamps of Ulster County, New York. And with these facts in mind, aided by photographs of various skeletons of mastodons, Mr. Gleeson made the restoration which accompanies this chapter. [Illustration: Fig. 40.--The Mastodon. _From a drawing by J. M. Gleeson._]