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an Elephant, but with a shorter proboscis and down-curving 
tusks like pickaxes to dig up succulent roots. On the Hima- 
layas roamed another vast nondescript, something between 
a Rhinoceros and an Elephant, with two pairs of vast horns, 
one somewhat like an Ox, and the other pair vast and 
branching like the Fallow Deer. A vast land Tortoise too 
existed, measuring some 30 feet from head to tail, and wan- 
dered through the primeval forests, beating down roads as 
broad as our highways as he walked. A vast two-horned 
Rhinoceros roamed on the plains bordering the Arctic Ocean, 
and the Mammoth, a sort of hairy elephant, existed in the 
same cold regions; nor must we forget the Mastodon, of 
which vast numbers must have existed, an animal elephantine 
in appearance, but with a body longer and legs shorter and 
stouter. Then there was the Megatherium, which Professor 
Owen so well describes, how it reared its vast bulk on end, 
aud after digging round the base, would embrace some vast 
forest tree and wrestle with it till it fell. How strange it is to 
reflect that here in England, where now London stands, with its 
miles of houses and countless throng of busy men, amid wild 
primeval forests roved the vast Dinotherium and Mastodon, 
while Hippopotami and Rhinoceroses wallowed in the adjacent 
swamps, and gigantic Oxen and Stags, Reindeer, long-tusked 
Mammoths, and two or three different species of Horses 
browsed around. Still more diffieult is it to imagine in this 
now peaceful land, that the Lion and Tiger once held sway 
among these vast but harmless animals, and that the Machai- 
rodon, a vast and bloodthirsty animal, larger and fiercer than 
the Bengal Tiger, with curved and saw-edged teeth, preyed 
on the peaceful stags and oxen. In this favored isle also 
existed vast and ferocious Bears and gigantic Hyzenas, whose 
bones are still found surrounded by the crushed and gnawed 
bones of their last victims. How wonderful to reflect that all 
these particulars can be gleaned from what I have heard 
spoken of, contemptuously, as “‘a parcel of old dried bones !” 
and yet a man, like Professor Owen, from a single fossil bone, 
will give you a whole history of species, shape, size, and 
habits of some long extinct animal ; and M. Dupont has 
written a most interesting book “‘ On the People of the Rein- 
deer Age” (that is, the period before the Reindeer retreated 
to his present quarter, in the north of Europe, and while he 
