84 BAHIA BLANCA. [chap. v. 



not to say preposterous, idea to conceive even antediluvian trees, 

 with branches strong enough to bear animals as large as ele- 

 phants. Professor Owen, with far more probability, believes 

 that, instead of climbing on the trees, they pulled the branches 

 down to them, and tore up the smaller ones by the roots, and so 

 fed on the leaves. The colossal breadth and weight of their 

 hinder quarters, which can hardly be imagined without having 

 been seen, become, on this view, of obvious service, instead of 

 being an incumbrance : their apparent clumsiness disappears. 

 With their great tails and their huge heels firmly fixed like a 

 tripod on the ground, they could freely exert the full force of 

 their most powerful arms and great claws. Strongly rooted, 

 indeed, must that tree have been, which could have resisted such 

 force ! The Mylodon, moreover, was furnished with a long 

 extensile tongue like that of the giraffe, which, by one of those 

 beautiful provisions of nature, thus reaches with the aid of its 

 long neck its leafy food. I may remark, that in Abyssinia the 

 elephant, according to Bruce, when it cannot reach with its 

 proboscis the branches, deeply scores with its tusks the trunk of 

 the tree, up and down and all round, till it is sufficiently 

 weakened to be broken down. 



The beds including the above fossil remains, stand only from 

 fifteen to twenty feet above the level of high-water ; and hence 

 the elevation of the land has been small (without there has 

 been an intercalated period of subsidence, of which we have no 

 evidence) since the great quadrupeds wandered over the sur- 

 rounding plains ; and the external features of the country must 

 then have been very nearly the same as now. What, it may natu- 

 rally be asked, was the character of the vegetation at that period ; 

 was the country as wretchedly sterile as it now is ? As so many 

 of the co-embedded shells are the same with those now living- in 

 the bav, I was at first inclined to think that the former vegeta- 

 tion was probably similar to the existing one ; but this would 

 have been an erroneous inference, for some of these same shells 

 live on the luxuriant coast of Brazil ; and generally, the character 

 of the inhabitants of the sea are useless as guides to judge of 

 those on the land. Nevertheless, from the following considera- 

 tions, I do not believe that the simple fact of many gigantic 

 quadrupeds having lived on the plains round Balua Blanca, is 



