Like the elephants of the present day, they wandered to great elevations, even up to the borders of perpetual snow; and a tooth described by Cuvier was obtained by Humboldt, in a volcano, at an elevation of seventy-two hundred feet above the level of the sea. A fine collection of these South-American mastodons is exhibited in the museum at Santiago. They were found by a party of men in an attempt to drain Lake Tagua in the province of Colchagua, about one hundred miles south of Santiago, sixty from the Pacific, and fourteen hundred feet above the sea. A ditch was cut, to drain off the water; and, after it had been drawn off, the remains of the great animal were seen lying upon the bottom. [Illustration: PLATE V. COHOES MASTODON. _Page 57._] With these mastodons, there existed in North America an elephant, _E. Columbi_, which probably associated in herds with the mastodon, but were not as large. The mastodons were extremely ponderous, and exceeded the largest elephant of to-day in size, and, though resembling them in general appearance, differed in several marked features. The tusks often grew in a peculiar manner: two large, nearly straight ones appeared in the upper jaw, while one or two protruded from the lower. As a rule, these lower incisors were small; but in some instances they attained considerable size. Imagine an elephant eleven or more feet in height, with three or four enormous sharp ivory tusks, its trunk raised aloft, rushing at an enemy! surely, such an animal was the true king of beasts, even in these early days. The tusks of the mastodons assumed many strange shapes, and a herd of these great creatures must have presented a curious appearance. As in other proboscidians, the teeth consisted of incisors and molars. In the _Mastodon turiensis_ of the pliocene time, found at Sismonda, the tusks of the upper jaw were nearly straight, though bending their points toward each other, long, sharp, and powerful. In a mastodon whose remains were found in Ohio (_Mastodon Ohioticus_), the tusks were long, gradually rising at the ends in a graceful curve; while in the lower jaw appeared a small single tusk. These lower incisors were present in the young of both sexes of this species, but were soon shed by the female, one being retained in the male; so that it was a three-tusked mastodon. In the _Mastodon longirostris_, there were, besides the two upper tusks, two long, slender tusks in the lower jaw, a defence more formidable than that possessed by any animal of to-day. In the elephant, the enamel is confined to the apex of the tusks; but in the huge mastodons They often had longitudinal bands of enamel, more or less spirally disposed upon their surface. The molar or grinding teeth of the mastodons appeared, much as in the elephants, in a horizontal succession: the front or worn-out teeth were pushed out or lost before the complete development of the posterior ones, which gradually moved