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The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 04, No. 23, September, 1859 by Various
page 46 of 285 (16%)
was announced to be a fossil-bed. Lumps of this clay being broken off
and crumbled up, proved indeed rich in deposit. They found sharks'
teeth, the edges still sharply serrated, firmly set in pieces of the
jawbone,--whales' teeth,--vertebrae of various species,--fragments of
bone, great and small,--several species of shell-fish, among which
chiefly abounded a kind called quahaug,--and many nondescript fragments,
not easily classified. One of these was a little bone closely resembling
the tibia of a child's leg, and may have belonged to some antediluvian
infant lost at sea, (if Noah's ancestors were mariners,) or perhaps
drowned in the Deluge,--for Mr. F. quoted an eminent geologist who has
visited the Vineyard, and who supposed these remains to have been
brought here by that mighty Flood-tide. Another _savant_, however,
supposes the island to have been thrown up from the sea by volcanic
action; and that the fossils, now imbedded in cliffs a hundred feet
high, were once deposited upon the bed of the ocean. There is certainly
a great amount of conglomerate, which has evidently been fused by
intense heat; and masses of rock, sea-pebbles, sand, and iron-ore are
now as firmly integrated as a piece of granite.

However, the fossils came; here they certainly are; many of them perfect
in form, and light and porous to the eye, but all hard and heavy as
stone to the touch. Teeth, which are considered the most valuable of all
the remains, are sometimes found as wide as a man's hand, and weighing
several pounds; but Mysie was quite content with the more insignificant
weight of those which filled her basket, especially when an immense
reticulated paving-stone was added, which Mr. F. pronounced to be a
whale's vertebra. She then was induced to trust the precious collection
to Caleb's care, the more willingly that the ascent of the cliffs was
now to be attempted. This was easily and quickly accomplished by Mr. F.
and his little son, by going to the right spot before beginning to
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