248 A BOOK-LOVER S HOLIDAYS 



But in the end, and also for unknown causes, 

 this great fauna died out in South America 

 likewise, 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 



