seven inches in length, and 11⁄4 inch in diameter, and weighed 131⁄4 pounds. It is placed near the cranium, in the museum.
The Warren Museum consists of two fire-proof rooms, one of which contains gigantic fossils, and the other, relics which the great anatomist wished to preserve with more than ordinary care. Among these are the skull, brain, and heart of Spurzheim, the phrenologist and anatomist, who died in Boston in 1832, and whose monument graces one of the principal avenues of Mount Auburn.
Spurzheim was a martyr to science, and those who were familiar with his self-forgetful life, and the vicissitudes of his career, could hardly view these relics with unmoistened eyes. The heart is preserved in a glass jar of alcohol, and the brain in a glass box filled with liquid. The Prussian philosopher died only two months after his arrival in Boston, during the delivery of his first course of lectures. He gave his body to science, to which, from boyhood, he had devoted all the energies of his soul.
The most remarkable object in the Warren Museum is the largest skeleton of the Mastodon giganteus ever discovered on the continent. By its side, in way of contrast, is the frame of the elephant Pizarro, the largest ever brought to this country. The skeleton of the Mastodon giganteus will not fail to cause the visitor to start back in awe, and he will be hardly able to suppress that adjective of fools, "Impossible!" It is twelve feet high, and thirty-four feet in length, from the tips of the tusks to the extremity of its tail. Its trunk is seventeen feet in length. The animal must have weighed more than 20,000 pounds!
Dr. Warren, in his magnificent and very costly work on the Mastodon giganteus, copies of which are only to be found in the rarest libraries, has given us an account of all that is known of this animal, and a very interesting description of the finding of this particular specimen, of which we make an abridgment:
At a very early period after the settlement of this country, relics of the mastodon were found in the vicinity of the Hudson River. Among these were a tooth, which is described by Dr. Cotton Mather, of Boston, as weighing more than four pounds, and a thigh-bone, said to have been more than seventeen feet long.
As the country became settled, mastodon-bones, in greater or less numbers, were found scattered over a large part of the territory of the United States, but chiefly near the Hudson, in the salt-licks of Kentucky, in the Carolinas, in Mississippi and Arkansas. They have recently been found in California and Oregon.
The Hudson River country, between New York and Albany, seems to have been a favorite resort of the mastodon race. The lands here were fertile, undulating, and well wooded, and the valleys contained lacustrine deposits, favorable to the growth of such trees and shrubs as would be likely to afford this animal subsistence.
