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IV. On the Adaptation of the Structure of the Sloths to their peculiar Mode of 

 Life. By the Rev. William Buckland, D.D. F.R.S. F.L.S. F.G.S., and 



Professor of Geology and Mineralogy in the University of Oxford. 



Read March 19tli, 1833. 



X HERE are, I believe, no animals whose structure has been so generally mis- 

 understood by naturalists, and respecting which so many errors have obtained 

 popular acceptance, as the Sloths : they are often quoted, even by the highest 

 authorities in comparative anatomy, as afTording examples of imperfect or- 

 ganization, and are proverbially misrepresented, as holding the most abject 

 place in creation, and as constructed only to lead a life of inconvenience and 

 misery. 



Cuvier (Ossemens Fossiles, vol. v. Part I. p. 72.) observes, that BufFon, after 

 having described with eloquence, and possibly with a little exaggeration, the 

 miserable condition in which the Sloths are placed by the organization of their 

 bodies, says of them, "Tout en eux nous rappelle ces monstres par defaut, 

 ces ^bauches imparfaites mille fois projet^es, execut6es par la nature, qui 

 ayant h peine la faculty d'exister, n'ont du subsister qu'un temps et ont 6t6 

 depuis effac^es de la liste des etres." Cuvier further states, that we find 

 in Sloths such few relations to ordinary animals, that the general laws of 

 existing organizations apply so little to them, and the different parts of their 

 body seem so much at variance with the laws of co-existence which we find 

 established throughout the rest of the animal kingdom, that we might really 

 believe them to be the remains of another order of things, the living relics 

 of that preceding state of nature, whose ruins we are obliged to search for in 

 the interior of the earth, and that they have by some miracle escaped the 

 catastrophes which destroyed the other species that were their contempo- 

 raries. 



The Elephants alone, perhaps, he adds, among the Mammalia, vary in as 

 great a degree as the Sloths from the general plan of Nature in the formation 



VOL. XVII. D 



