Here the palæontology of the New World discloses to us types of a fauna pertaining to its latest transitional period, which serve to illustrate the marvellous contrast between its commencement and its close. Until the discovery of teeth of the megatherium in the post-pleiocene bed of the Ashley River, remains of that extinct mammal had been found only in the state of Georgia, in North America, while the _Mastodon Ohioticus_ and _Elephas primigenius_ are among the well-known fauna of the Canadian drift. Of those, some North American localities have furnished remains in remarkable profusion, but none more so than the celebrated morass in Kentucky, known by its homely but expressive name of the Big-bone Lick. Imbedded in the blue clay of this ancient bog, entire skeletons, or detached bones, of not less than one hundred mastodons and twenty mammoths, have been found, besides remains of the megalonyx and other extinct quadrupeds. A magnificent skeleton of the _Mastodon Ohioticus_, now in the British Museum, was discovered, with teeth and bones of many others, near the banks of La Pomme de Terre, a tributary of the Osage River, Missouri; and there once more we seem to come upon contemporaneous traces of man. “The bones,” says Mantell, who examined them in the presence of Mr. Albert Koch, their discoverer, “were imbedded in a brown sandy deposit full of vegetable matter, with recognisable remains of the cypress, tropical cane, and swamp-moss, stems of the palmetto, etc., and this was covered by beds of blue clay and gravel to a thickness of about 15 feet. Mr. Koch states, and he personally assured me of the correctness of the statement, that an Indian flint arrow-head was found beneath the leg-bones of this skeleton, and four similar weapons were imbedded in the same stratum.”[22] Some of the deductions of Mr. Koch were extravagant, and tended to bring discredit on his statement. But there appear to be no just grounds for doubting the main facts. A full-sized view of the large arrow-head is given in the Smithsonian Report of 1872. Another, but more dubious account, preserved in the _American Journal of Science_, describes the discovery in Missouri of the bones of a mammoth, with considerable portions of the skin, associated with stone spear-heads, axes, and knives, under circumstances which suggest the idea that it had been entangled in a bog, and there stoned to death and partially consumed by fire.[23] Such contiguity of the works of man with those extinct mammals warns us at least to be on our guard against any supercilious rejection of indications of his ancient presence in the New World as well as in the Old.