

OF A FORMER WORLD. 39 



of South America, which were once occupied by immense 

 numbers of the race now entirely extinct, partakes of the 

 generic character of the existing diminutive sloths. It ri- 

 valled in size the largest rhinoceros, was armed with claws 

 of enormous length and power, its whole frame possessing 

 an extreme degree of solidity. With a head and neck like 

 those of the sloth, its legs and feet exhibit the character of 

 the armadillo and the ant-eater. Some specimens of the 

 animal give the measurement of five feet across the haunches, 

 and the thigh bone was nearly three times as thick as that 

 of the elephant. The spinal marrow must have been a foot 

 in diameter, and the tail, at the part nearest the body, twice 

 as large, or six feet in circumference. The girth of the 

 body was fourteen feet and a half, and the length eighteen 

 feet. The teeth were admirably adapted for cutting vege- 

 table substances, and the general structure and strength of 

 the frame for tearing up the ground in search of roots, 

 wrenching off the branches of trees, and uprooting their 

 trunks, on which it principally fed. " Heavily constructed, 

 and ponderously accoutred/' says Dr. Buckland, in his elo- 

 quent description of the megatherium, "it could neither 

 run, nor leap, nor climb, nor burrow under the ground; 

 and all its movements must have been necessarily slow. 

 But what need of rapid locomotion to an animal whose oc- 

 cupation, of digging roots for food, was almost stationary ? 

 And what need of speed for flight from foes, to a creature 

 whose giant carcase was encased in an impenetrable cuirass, 

 and who, by a single pat of his paw, or lash of his tail, 

 could in an instant have demolished the couguar or the 



in the fissures of the rocks, and in the caverns of Australia, a country in 

 which marsupial animals are the principal existing mammalia, is a fact 

 that will not excite much surprise ; but that beings of this remarkable 

 type of organization should ever have inhabited the countries situated in 

 the latitude of the European continent and of Great Britain, would never 

 have been suspected, but for the researches of the geologist. 



