122 MAMMALIAN DESCENT. [Lect. IV. 



Lear's head and tiaigue have longtlieued throiigli tlic ages; in 

 this he has gone on unto perfection. The Sloth, also, has cnt olfV 

 not his right hand, but all his unnecessary fingers, during the long* 

 secular period in which he has been slowly moving towards the 

 mark of his particular type of excellence, and his face has gone on 

 shortening, so that, although a long way below a jNIonkey, there- 

 is something monkey-like in his curious short muzzle. 



Time, that iinwearied harvest-man, has almost finished his mowings 

 in this field. Here and there, his two-handed engine has left a 

 patch of poorer stuff, a narrow headland of weaker, and later 

 growth. The rest he has garnered and locked up safely, not, how- 

 ever, without letting fall here and there, as if by accident, a handful 

 or two, which the stranger from a far country has been too glad to 

 glean. But if Time has been so much against the modern biologist, 

 there was no reason why Nature (or Wisdom, to use another image) 

 should have been so anxious to hide these types from iis ; nothing 

 more perfect was ever developed by the morphological force. Here 

 one can speak great words, and yet not be hyperbolical ; the little 

 finger of the Megatherium was literally bigger than the sloth's loins, 

 and all the existing Armadillos (one of each) might be packed in 

 the body-case of a Glyptodon — the extinct Armadillo with sculptured 

 teeth. 



The largest Green Turtle would look a poor, shrunken thing beside 

 a living Glj'ptodon, a mean hero in a mean armour, not worth ten 

 oxen, but the Glyptodon's armour could not be bought for a hundred 

 oxen. Yet that reptile-in-armour, in his own element, is like a swift 

 ship; the Glyptodon had to carry his superb body -house on stumpy 

 legs; he must, in Avalking, have seemed like a huge boml;)ard full of 

 li(pior, that was ])eing carried off by his oaken tressles or undersetters.. 



If the ]\Iegatherium, or his somewhat more modest-sized relation 

 tlie Mijhxhni (another extinct Sloth), did find their sui)ply of 

 food in the way palaeontologists suggest, their mode of dining nnist 

 have been a sight worth seeing. That delightful, tyi)ical English- 

 man, the late Rev. Sidney Smith, once reviewed Waterton's 

 Wanfhrinf/s, and described the strange^, grotesque, weird, unthought- 

 of creatures of the Kew Tropics. Would that he held the pen here, 

 now ! 



Let ;is, however, try to imagine a Megatherium waking up after- 



