VERMONT.
(Map [12].)
1. Mount Holly, Rutland County.—In 1849 (Proc. Amer. Assoc. Adv. Sci., vol. II, p. 100), Professor Louis Agassiz exhibited before the members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science a tooth and a tusk of an elephant, discovered in making excavations for the Rutland and Burlington Railroad, somewhere on the slope of Mount Holly, Rutland County. It was said to have been found lying under an erratic boulder. Agassiz was doubtful as to the specific identity of the animal. In 1850 (Amer. Jour. Sci., ser. 2, vol. IX, p. 256), Zadock Thompson gave a brief account of this discovery. The remains were found, he said, in Mount Holly Township, at an elevation of 1,360 feet above sea-level, in a deposit of muck, at a depth of about 9 feet. This muck-bed is located on the divide between the streams which flow into Connecticut River and those which empty into Lake Champlain. In 1853 (“History of Vermont,” App., p. 14) Thompson presented a more extended report on the discovery. This is reprinted in Edward Hitchcock’s “Report on the Geology of Vermont,” 1861, page 176. The elevation is given here as 1,415 feet; the location is said to be east of the summit station. On the Wallingford topographic sheet of the U. S. Geological Survey the station named Summit is shown to have an elevation of 1,500 feet. First, there was found a tooth lying on gravel beneath 11 feet of peat; soon afterward a tusk was discovered at a distance of 80 feet, and later the other tusk and some bones were met with not far away. The grinder was in an excellent state of preservation. The length of one tusk along the convexity of the curve is given as 80 inches, while the distance direct from the base to the tip was 60 inches. A figure of the tusk was given by Hager in the second volume of the 1861 report just referred to, on page 934. According to Agassiz’s statement, the tooth and tusk were taken to the Lawrence Scientific School, Cambridge.
Dr. J. C. Warren (“Monogr. on Mastodon giganteus,” ed. 2, 1855, p. 162, plate XXVIII, fig. B) figured and described the tooth. The length was given as 11 inches at the base, and the number of ridge-plates as 22. This would give an average of 8 plates in a 100–mm. line. This number and the general appearance of the tooth indicate that the animal was Elephas columbi, instead of E. primigenius. The difference between this tooth and that of E. primigenius is well shown by the figure of a tooth of E. primigenius from Zanesville, Ohio, figured on the same plate with the Vermont tooth. This tooth is now in the American Museum at New York.
Thompson reported the presence of many billets of wood, about 18 inches long, in the bottom of the muck, the work of beavers.
At the Davenport (Iowa) Academy of Natural Science the writer examined a tooth of an elephant labeled as having been found on Mount Holly in excavating for the Vermont Central Railroad. The length along the base is 300 mm., the height of the ninth plate is 160 mm., the length of the grinding-surface 160 mm. There are in all 24 plates, the 10 anterior ones of which are worn. There are 7 ridge-plates in a 100–mm. line, measured on one side of the tooth. This tooth is regarded as belonging to Elephas columbi; it certainly belonged to another individual than the one that Warren figured. It is almost certain that the animals represented by the teeth and skeletal remains found on Mount Holly lived after the retreat of the ice from those mountains; and one may suppose that local glaciers lingered long after the main ice-front had abandoned the region. The animals lived certainly as late as near the close of the Pleistocene, if not at the beginning of the Recent; they may have been living on those mountains while the basin of Lake Champlain was an arm of the sea.