From this place Hon. Judah P. Benjamin, Secretary of the Confederate States, now Solicitor-general for the Queen of England, made his escape. Here he remained six months under an assumed name, with the pretext of desiring to purchase hummock-lands. During his stay newspapers were shown him by his friends, in which were large rewards offered for his capture; but his protectors scorned treachery for gold. He left Manatee, disguised as a cook, on board a sloop. Before they reached Key West their little craft was overhauled by a United States revenue-cutter. The powerless foe for whom they were searching, not being recognized in his galley disguise, ran the gauntlet in safety. While on his way to Nassau the schooner in which he was sailing, not being able to resist the heavy seas that it had to encounter, sunk, when he was shipwrecked, losing all his personal effects, and was rescued from drowning only by escaping to a small boat, from which he was afterward picked up by an English vessel. He was recently solicited to write an account of his adventures before escaping to Europe, but replied, "It is too soon." In this portion of Florida have been discovered bones of immense size, belonging to an order of animals now extinct--these being fragments of the [Illustration: MASTODON GIGANTICUS.] mammiferous mastodon and megatherium, which furnish material for study that takes us back to the earliest history of the world, before giants lived, or Adam was made out of the red clay, to enter Eden and participate in its primeval glories. When those creatures, that now only excite our wonder, walked the earth, covered with their piles of flesh, moving with majestic tread the uninhabited globe, the sloth was then the size of an ox, the bear as large as a horse. Portions of vertebræ belonging to the mastodon _giganticus_--a race of elephants that lived during the tertiary period--have been discovered here, measuring eleven feet in height, with a body seventeen feet in length, and a huge tail over six feet long. The bones of this animal, when exhumed, were found in marl-pits, or salt-licks containing saline matter, to which may be attributed their remarkable preservation. Their grinding-teeth were adapted to a much coarser article of diet than that consumed by elephants of the present period. They have also been called "the hairy elephant." Was it not the mammoth megatherium that furnished the aborigines with material for pointing their spears and manufacturing their bone implements, the remains of which are now frequently found beneath the _tumuli_ of Florida? The megatherium was a contemporary of the mastodon--a few bones having been exhumed in South Florida; but Skiddaway, on the coast of Georgia, has furnished remains of the most perfect and interesting specimens of this animal ever found in North America, discovered in 1855. This herbivorous creature belonged to an extinct species of sloth, which had ribs measuring more than three