VERMONT.
12. Charlotte, Chittenden County.—At this place were discovered considerable parts of a whale, described in 1850 (Amer. Jour. Sci., ser. 2, vol. IX, pp. 256–263) by Zadock Thompson, under the name Beluga vermontana. The animal has by many been regarded as identical with the white whale, Delphinapterus leucas, now appearing sometimes as far up as Montreal. A more extended description of it was given in 1853 (Hist. Vermont, Append., p. 15, figs. 1–13). This was reproduced in Edward Hitchcock’s Report on the Geology of Vermont, 1861, page 164, and was followed by remarks on the specimen by Edward Hitchcock jr. In the second volume of the work just cited (p. 938) Hager furnished a figure of the skeleton as mounted. In 1908 (Rep. State Geologist Vermont, 1907–8, pp. 76–112, plates X-XIX), Professor G. H. Perkins gave an extended description of the remains and reached the conclusion that D. vermontanus is distinct from D. leucas. Since Perkins’s article gives a full history of the discovery and the literature pertaining to the specimen, this account will be much abridged. The bones were found in making a cut for the Rutland and Burlington Railroad, at the town of Charlotte, about a mile east of the shore of Lake Champlain. The bones were 8 or 9 feet below the surface and “were very completely bedded in fine adhesive blue clay.” The locality is 60 feet above the mean level of the lake and 150 feet above the sea. The deposits were laid down in the marine waters which took possession of Lake Champlain and the St. Lawrence Valley when the Wisconsin glacial ice had withdrawn north of St. Lawrence River. The geological age of the animal is therefore late Pleistocene.