But whither shall we turn to avoid finding similar phenomena? The vast deposits of mammals in the Rocky Mountains may occur to the reader. As Dana says, they "have been found to be literally Tertiary burial grounds." I need not go into the details of these deposits, nor of those in other places containing the great mammals which must have been contemporary with "Tertiary man," for I would only weary the reader with a monotony of abnormal conditions of deposit--unlike anything now being produced this wide world over. We shall be stating the case very mildly indeed, if we conclude that the vast majority of the fossils, by their profuse abundance and their astonishing preservation, tell a very plain story of "speedy burial after death," and =are of an essentially different character= from modern deposits. Prof. Nicholson, in speaking of the remains of the Zeuglodon, says: "Remains of these gigantic whales are very common in the 'Jackson beds' of the Southern United States. So common are they that, according to Dana, 'the large vertebrae, some of them a foot and a half long and a foot in diameter, were formerly so abundant over the country in Alabama that they were used for making walls, or were burned to rid the fields of them.'"[66] Shortly before his death in 1895, Dana prepared a revised edition of his "Manual," and in it he gives us quite a rational explanation of this case, as follows: "Vertebrae were so abundant, on the first discovery, in some places that many of these Eocene whales must have been stranded together in a common catastrophe, on the northern borders of the Mexican Gulf--possibly by a series of earthquake waves of great violence; or by an elevation along the sea limit that made a confined basin of the border region, which the hot sun rendered destructive alike to Zeuglodons and their game; or by an unusual retreat of the tide, which left them dry and floundering under a tropical sun." (p. 908.) That is, this veteran geologist in his old age would not attempt to account for such abnormal conditions without a catastrophe of some kind. But if we use similar explanations for similar conditions, where shall we stop through the whole range of the rocks from the Cambrian to the Pleistocene?