OF ANIMALS. m 



under new genera, as we shall have occasion to notice still farther in a sub- 

 sequent study. In the new and untried soil of America, the bones of un- 

 known kinds and species lie buried in profusion ; and my late friend Professor 

 Barton, of Philadelphia, one of our first transatlantic physiologists, informed 

 me by letter a short time before his death, that they are perpetually turning 

 up skeletons of this description, whose living representatives are nowhere 

 to be met with. 



In few words, every region has been enriched with wonders of animal 

 life that have long been extinct for ever. Where is now that enormous mam- 

 moth, whose bulk outrivalled the elephant's 1* where that gigantic tapir, of a 

 structure nearly as mountainous,* whose huge skeleton has been found in a 

 fossil state inFrance and Germany ; while its only living type, a pigmy of 

 what has departed, exists in the wilds of America] where is now the 

 breathing form of the fossil sloth of America, the magaloninx of Cuvier, 

 whose size meted that of the ox 1* where the might)- moniter,* outstripping 

 the lengthened bulk of the crocodile ? itself, too, a lord of the ocean, and yet, 

 whose only relics have been traced in the quarries of Maestricht ; to which, 

 as to another leviathan, we may well apply the forcible description of the 

 Book of Job, " at whose appearing the mighty were afraid, and who made the 

 deep to boil as a caldron : who esteemed iron as straw, and brass as rotten 

 wood ; who had not his like upon the earth, and was a king amid the children 

 of pride."f 



Over this recondite arid bewildering subject skeptics have laughed and critics 

 have puzzled themselves ; it is natural history alone that can find us a clew 

 to the labyrinth, that enables us to repose faith in the records of antiquity, and 

 that establishes the important position, that the extravagance of a description 

 is no argument against the truth of a description, and that it is somewhat top 

 much to deny that a thing has existed formerly, for the mere reason that it 

 does not exist now. 



See Series n Lecture fi. t Job, xli 26. 27. 31 3 



