A REMARKABLE DISCOVERY.

The Fossilized Remains of a Horse
Found in a Stone Quarry Sixty Feet
Beneath the Earth's Surface.

A remarkable discovery of the fossilized remains of a horse was made in a stone quarry, in the Sixth ward of this city, on Wednesday last, at a depth that completely upsets the theory which has long held that the horse was unknown in this country anterior to the discoveries of Christopher Columbus.

The quarry in which the remains of the animal were found is situated on the right bank of the Lackawanna river, lying southwest of the main portion of the city, and has been worked for the past year by Mr. J. L. Gardner, of Dodgetown.

The discovery was made by two workmen, named John Keating and David Sprindle, who are engaged in blasting the rocks, and who on first seeing the perfect fossil lying full length in the solid stone were somewhat surprised. They did not, however regard the discovery of any great importance to the outside world, and as soon as their own brief astonishment was satisfied, they proceeded with their work, blasted the fossil into fragments, and threw the greater portion of it into the river along with the other pieces of rock that were useless to them.

A REPUBLICAN reporter visited the scene of the discovery yesterday, and by the kindness of Mr. J. L. Gardner, was successful in securing a portion of the petrified horse in excellent condition.

The spot where the animal lay is sixty feet below the surface of the earth. The first thirteen feet consist of clay of a loamy nature, after which there are thirty feet of Diamond vein coal, and again five feet of solid rock, beneath which the equine fossil was found. Underneath this point is a splendid stratum of shale twenty-three feet in thickness, after which is reached what is known as the Rock vein of coal.

It has long been a vexed question with scientists, as well as the community of thinkers at large, whether the horse really had an existence on this hemisphere prior to the discoveries of Columbus. Numerous arguments have recently been advanced in favor of the pre-historic horse,

the most convincing of which have been the discovery of the petrified remains of the "noble animal" in strata of different degrees of depth and character, whose growth must date away back in the dim centuries of the past. The discovery, in the most solid state of petrification, of the fossil to which we allude, at a depth of sixty feet, under different strata of earth, shale, solid rock and coal, forms a most convincing argument in favor of the horse's ancient history, and of the recent results to which science has attained in other portions of the country.

The most brilliant minds of which we can boast at the present day, are arriving at the conclusion that America, as well as the other great divisions of the globe, was, in the dim vista of the past, the native habitat of the horse; and evidences continue to be furnished every day to strengthen the beliefs in this important theory. What a pre-historic age may have worked in the matter of evolution, is a problem that science will doubtless eventually solve.

At present, however, we have but a few of the links of a chain, the end of which lies buried in the by gone ages. One by one science takes up these links, and day by day some mystery is unfolded. The fossil remains of the horse, have been found in the caves of Brazil and yet there is no record of his coeval existence with man, until he was brought from Europe by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century. It is probable that when this valley was a vast lake, the horse whose remains were found in the stone quarry close to the Lackawanna on Wednesday, was drowned, and that when the great cataclysm was swept away from our valleys and hills by the ever shifting scenes of time, the formations of subsequent centuries produced the strata of slate and rock and coal, beneath which the petrified stee has been preserved.