Pate 
IV. On the Adaptation of the Structure of the Sloths to their peculiar Mode of 
Life. By the Rev. Wiu1am Buckiawp, D.D. F.R.S. F.L.S. F.G.S., and 
Professor of Geology and Mineralogy in the University of Oxford. 
Read March 19th, 1833. 
THERE are, I believe, no animals whose structure has been so generally mis- 
understood by naturalists, and respecting which so many errors have obtained 
popular acceptance, as the Sloths: they are often quoted, even by the highest 
authorities in comparative anatomy, as affording examples of imperfect or- 
ganization, and are proverbially misrepresented, as holding the most abject 
place in creation, and as constructed only to lead a life of inconvenience and 
misery. 
Cuvier (Ossemens Fossiles, vol. v. Part I. p. 72.) observes, that Buffon, after 
having described with eloquence, and possibly with a little exaggeration, the 
miserable condition in which the Sloths are placed by the organization of their 
bodies, says of them, “ Tout en eux nous rappelle ces monstres par défaut, 
ces ébauches imparfaites mille fois projetées, exécutées par la nature, qui 
ayant à peine la faculté d'exister, n'ont dü subsister qu'un temps et ont été 
depuis effacées de la liste des étres.” Cuvier further states, that we find 
in Sloths such few relations to ordinary animals, that the general laws of 
existing organizations apply so little to them, and the different parts of their 
body seem so much at variance with the laws of co-existence which we find 
established throughout the rest of the animal kingdom, that we might really 
believe them to be the remains of another order of things, the living relies 
of that preceding state of nature, whose ruins we are obliged to search for in 
the interior of the earth, and that they have by some miracle escaped the 
catastrophes which destroyed the other species that were their contempo- 
raries. | 
. The Elephants alone, perhaps, he adds, among the Mammalia, vary in as 
great a degree as the Sloths from the general plan of Nature in the formation 
VOL. XVII. — ee D 
