248 A BOOK-LOVER'S HOLIDAYS 



But in the end, and also for unknown causes, 

 this great fauna died out in South America 

 Hkewise, leaving a continent faunistically even 

 more impoverished than North America. The 

 great autochthonous forms shared the extinction 

 of the big creatures of the immigrant fauna; 

 for under stress of competition with the new- 

 comers, the ancient ungulates and edentates 

 had developed giants of their own. 



Recent discoveries have shown that the ex- 

 tinction was not complete when the ancestors 

 of the Indians of to-day reached the southern 

 Andes and the Argentine plains. An age pre- 

 viously the forefathers of these newcomers had 

 lived in a land with the wild horse, the wild 

 elephant, and the lion; and now, at the opposite 

 end of the world, they had themselves reached 

 such a land. The elephants were mastodons of 

 peculiar type; the horses were of several kinds, 

 some resembling modern horses, others differ- 

 ing from them in leg and skull formation more 

 than any of the existing species of ass, horse, 

 or zebra differ from one another; the huge 

 cats probably resembled some other big mod- 

 ern feline more than they did the lion. As- 

 sociated with them were many great beasts, 

 whose like does not now exist on earth. The 

 sabretooth was there, as formidable as his 



