156 Transactions of the Society. 



name would imply. Although without teeth in the front of the 

 jaws, they yet possess cheek teeth ; the Ant-eaters, however, have 

 no teeth. The existing forms are all of moderate size, being repre- 

 sented by the Ant-eater Myrmccophaga, of which there are three 

 species living in South America, two species of scaly Ant-eaters 

 in Africa, and two in the East Indies. Orycteropus, the hairy Ant- 

 eater, or " Aard-vark," of the Cape, is lound also in north-eastern 

 Africa, and fossil in the island of Samos. The great body of 

 Edentate animals are characteristic of South America ; there are, 

 beside the Ant-eaters, many species of Armadillos and several forms 

 of Tree-Sloths ; this group of animals is interesting also as affording 

 illustrations of mammals, in some of which the hairy covering is 

 quite subsidiary ; the scaly Ant-eaters having an entire covering of 

 horny scales like some reptiles, whilst in the Armadillos the body 

 and tail are provided with a coat of mail, having a thin horny 

 surface with thick bony plates beneath. 



The modern Armadillos have a banded coat of bony, horny 

 scales, arranged in rows, so as to enable the animal to roll itself 

 into a ball like a hedgehog. But in Tertiary times the Armadillos 

 were represented by many species of Olyptodon and of Hoplophorus 

 of giant size, which had no bands to their armour, but were 

 covered with a solid cuirass of thick bony plates united together 

 into one massive shield, covering the whole body and attached to 

 the bony vertebral skeleton within. The modern Sloths are small, 

 the largest of them not being bigger than a moderate sized dog ; 

 they spend their lives in an arboreal existence, climbing by means 

 >f their long claw-like nails among the boughs of lofty trees, on 

 the foliage of which they browse ; they sleep in the same manner 

 attached by their hooked claws to the branches of trees, and carry 

 their young with them. 



The Ancient Sloths were of gigantic size, and being so large 

 they dwelt upon the ground, but like their small modern repre- 

 sentatives they fed upon the leaves of trees and obtained them 

 by uprooting the trees with their powerful feet armed with strong 

 claws. The last surviving species of Giant Ground Sloths lived 

 contemporary with early man in South America, probably, indeed, 

 within a hundred years of the present time. In a cave in South 

 America near Last Hope Inlet, in Patagonia, numerous remains of 

 these animals, named Ncomylodon, had evidently been kept in 

 confinement, and fed upon grass cut by man, as cows are kept 

 in a shed at the present day. They were killed off by their 

 captors from time to time when needed for food, and their bones, 

 with the implements of early man, were found in the cave where 

 they had been eaten. No historic record of these South American 

 Indians is known ; we cannot, therefore, fix the exact date when 

 these great animals were last seen alive. Like the Moa in New 

 Zealand, the Jfipyornis in Madagascar, and the great sea-cow 



