combined with a tremendous tempest or tornado; and all were involved in one common ruin. Several veins of iron pyrites ran through the stratum.” “The next over this formation was a layer of plastic clay of the _Eocene_ region, also with iron pyrites. It was three feet in thickness; over this a layer of conglomerate from nine to eighteen inches in thickness; over this a layer of marl of the Pliocene region, from three to four feet in thickness; next, a second conglomerate from nine to eighteen inches in thickness. This was succeeded by a layer of yellow clay of the Pliocene; over this a third layer of conglomerate from nine to eighteen inches in thickness, and at last the present surface, consisting of brownish clay mingled with a few pebbles, and covered with large oak, maple, and elm trees, which were, as near as I could ascertain, from eighty to one hundred years old. In the centre of the above-mentioned deposit was a large spring which appeared to rise from the very bowels of the earth, as it was never affected by the severest rain, nor did it become lower by the longest draught.”[126] The preceding accounts were presented to the St. Louis Academy of Sciences in a special paper several years later (1857).[127] Dr. Foster is inclined to believe that Dr. Koch was not mistaken in his claimed discovery, having arrived at that opinion by pointedly questioning him on the subject a short time before his (Koch’s) death.[128] Charles Rau is also of the opinion that he was truthful.[129] Mr. J. D. Dana, however, discusses the case as follows: “In the account of the second case above cited Dr. Koch says that the Missourium was embedded in a brown alluvium of the Eocene region resting on the ‘upper green sand;’ that next over it was plastic clay of the ‘Eocene region’ and beds of the ‘Pliocene region.’ He thus makes his Missourium to have come from the lower tertiary, and from a bed just above the green sand (cretaceous) when actually from quartenary beds; and he uses the terms Eocene and Pliocene, as if he had no familiarity with geological facts or language. The earlier pamphlet of 1840 avoids this bad geology, ‘the upper green sand,’ in that being called simply quicksand and the other beds merely beds of clay and conglomerate. All the pamphlets sustain the conclusion that Dr. Koch knew almost nothing of geology, and that what he gradually picked up from intercourse with geologists, he generally made much of but seldom was able to use rightly.”[130] The same critic says: “In zoological knowledge he was equally deficient,” and cites the fact of the discoverer recognizing the resemblance to the mastodon, still makes the animal an inhabitant of the watercourses like the hippopotamus; states that his food “consisted as much of vegetables as of flesh, although he undoubtedly consumed a great abundance of the latter,” and makes the marvelous revelation that he “_was capable of feeding himself with his fore-foot after the manner of the beaver or otter_.” Mr.