120 
POPULAE SCIENCE IS'EWS. 
[August, 1891. 
new genus for it, intermediate between the sloths 
and tlie armadillos, since to the shape of tlie head 
of the formei- it joined the teeth of tlie latter. To 
this genus he gave the name of Megatherium — the 
iarge animal. 
Nothing could have been a greater surprise to 
the naturalists of his day than this clas8ificatio:i 
of Cuvier's. That there could be any relation be- 
tween this gigantic, powerful creature and the 
small, insignificant sloths — animals considered at 
tliat time even by Buffon and Cuvier himself so 
imperfect and grotesque that simple existence 
alone must be a burden to'them — was a revelation 
for which the world was hardly prepared. It 
was, however, a reference worthy of Cuvier, and 
Megatherium americanum, from the Pleistocene of South 
America. (Much reduced.) 
modern science has confirmed its sagacity. The 
megatherium is substantially a gigantic antique 
slotli, notwithstanding that its relation to the 
sloths from the South American forests of today 
has to be t.aken on faith by most of the visitors to 
the Jardin des Plantes. In the menageries are 
the little living animals dragging their limbs 
laboriously and awlcwardly along the ground, 
hanging asleep from the limbs of trees, or climb- 
ing with activity and ease among the branches. 
In the museum is this colossal skeleton of their 
ancestor, standing as a perpetual witness to the 
fact that. the mighty must yield when conditions 
become fit only for the humble and weak. 
rhe megatherium is now desired for every mu- 
seum, but happy is that institution tliat can secure 
even a few bones of the mighty beast. Madrid is 
the happy owner of tlie classical specimen studied 
by Cuvier; Paris, as has been seen, boasts an al- 
most complete skeleton ; Berlin is equally fortu- 
nate. But, with these exceptions, and that of the 
skeleton discovered at Lima hi 1795, — which may 
be the one now at Berlin, — the animal is chiefly 
known by plaster models made from a study of 
detached bones. Such a model adorns the new 
Natural History Building at Kensington. T'he 
pelvis, thighs, and upper bones of the tail are 
cast, with some other parts, from remains found 
by Sir Woodbine Parish in the bed of a stream 
near Buenos Ayres, after a succession of three 
unusually dry seasons. They indicate a skeleton 
still larger than that described by Cuvier. llie 
model, eighteen feet in length, is the original of 
the second current figure of the megatherium, and 
represents the animal with the right hand clasp- 
ing the trunk of a tree — a position that is con- 
sidered somewhat hypothetical by critics. Open 
to still more criticism, though remarkably strik- 
ing, is the attitude ascribed to the monster in 
some American museums. Kesting on its liuge 
haunches it well displays the size and massiveness 
of the thigh bones and pelvis, while the powerful 
arms with their formidable claws leave little room 
to doubt that the tree they clasp and bend would 
readily have succumbed to their attack. 
The megatherium, the first of tlie extinct 
ground sloths to be brought back into the life 
of the present, is still regarded as the most inter- 
esting and wonderful of the family, although re- 
mains of at least seven other gigantic forms have 
been discovered and described. The first of these 
to attract wide attention was the almost complete 
skeleton of an animal somewhat smaller than the 
megatherium, being only eleven feet from the 
point of the muzzle to the end of the tail. This 
u-.i.s found by Sir Woodbine Parish near Buenos 
Ayres in 1841, and presented to the Royal College 
of Surgeons, in I^ondon, where it may still be seen 
as it was first set up. The arms resting one above 
the other on the trunk of a tree indicate even 
more power than those of the megatherium, 
though the thigh bones are far less massive, the 
skull is sliorter and lighter, and the under jaw 
neither so thick nor so heavy. To this creature 
Professor (now Sir Richard) Owen, then the cura- 
tor of the Ilunterian Museum, — the museum at- 
tached to the Royal College of Surgeons, — gave 
the name Mylodon, or the mill-toothed animal, 
adding robustus to indicate the formidable strength 
of its framework. At the instigation of the coun- 
cil of the college this mylodon was especially de- 
scribed and figured by Professor Owen in a mag- 
nificent quarto work. In this, besides giving an 
analysis of its osteological structure, he, by a 
masterly piece of deductive reasoning, threw light 
on a problem that had puzzled naturalists ever 
since Cuvier first pronounced the megatherium a 
leaf-eating animal. The teeth and peculiar con- 
formation of the jaws of the mylodon bore like 
testimony as to the food of this megatherioid 
family. These colossal creatures lived on leaves 
and small twigs of trees, as the giraffs, elephants, 
and sloths do today. How did they obtain this 
food? The giraff raises its head to graze among 
the foliage of the trees ; the elephant, its trunk. 
The neck of the ground sloths was short and mas- 
sive, and there is little reason to believe that tiiey 
carried even a short nasal ajjpendage. The little 
modern sloths run along the under side of the 
branches until they find a convenient feeding 
place. It is preposterous to imagine an animal 
Mylodon robustus, from the Pleistocene of South America. 
(Much reduced.) 
as bulky as a rhinoceros hanging back down from 
the under side of the limbs of a tree. Neverthe- 
less, the ponderous forms of the extinct sloths 
and great, strong, curved claws seemed so little 
adapted for locomotion that some eminent natu- 
ralists entertained even tliis bold idea. Others, 
less daring, surrendered the leaf diet and sup- 
posed the animals to have burrowed lor roots. 
Professor Owen showed that they could obtain 
the leaves without in any way raising their heads, 
for, with their massive strength, they could bring 
down the branches of the trees to the level of 
their jaws. On this view, the breadth and weight 
of their hind quarters are no longer an incum- 
brance. With their great tails and huge heels 
firmly fixed like a tripod on the ground, they 
grasped tlie trunk of a tree with their powerful 
arms, and either broke it short oft' above the 
ground or wrenched it up by the roots, having 
previously employed the enormous claws to 
scratch away the earth and render the overthrow 
more certain. "Extraordinary," says Professor 
Owen, "must have been the strength and propor- 
tions of that tree which, partly undermined, and 
firmly grappled as with prehensile liooks, could, 
rocked to and fro, to right and left, long with- 
stand the efforts of its ponderous .assailant." 
That this assailant, sluggish as well as ponder- 
ous, could not always avoid the shock of the fall- 
ing tree is suggested in the skull described by 
Professor Owen, which had been twice fractured 
and healed during life. 
As with the remains of megatherium so it is 
with those of mylodon ; detached bones of more 
than one species are found in North and South 
America, but a complete skeleton seldom comes 
to light. Indeed, besides that of the Royal Col- 
lege of Surgeons, there is, as yet, but one other, 
and that has been set up recently in the new Nat- 
ural History Buildhig at South Kensington. 
[Original in Popular Science News.] 
HIEROGLYPHIC INSCRIPTIONS OF EGYPT 
AND PALESTINE — HOW READ, AND BY 
WHOM DISCOVERED AND DECIPHERED. 
BY JOSEPH WALLACE. 
In the April issue of Popclae Science New^s 
we stated that the rings on the Rosetta stone puz- 
zled the learned men of Europe who were inter- 
ested in hieroglyphic writing, but it was con- 
j«ctured by some that each ring was the sign of 
the proper name ; and, further, it was discovered 
that the character of the writing was a mixed 
one, containing partly jiictures of objects and 
partly signs of sounds. This discovery was an- 
nounced by Champollion in a paper at Grenoble 
in 1810, and soon after confirmed by Thomas 
Young, an eminent Oriental scholar. Champol- 
lion acknowledged that he was led to this discov- 
ery by the labors of De Sacy and Ackerblad, who 
had show n that the Greek proper n.ames on the 
Rosetta stone were transcribed phonetically in 
the demotic version. These results were obtained 
by guessing that a group occurring in almost 
every line was the conjunction ; that a group re- 
peated twenty-nine times in the demotic version 
corresponded to king in Greek, where the word 
occurred about the same number of times. For 
the words Alexander and Alexandria in the fourth 
and seventeenth lines of the Greek, were discov- 
ered two groups of equally close resemblance in 
the second and tenth lines of the demotic. 
Young's most important contribution to deciph- 
ering the character of the writing was to assert 
the ideographic nature of many demotic signs, in 
opposition to the current belief that the hieratic 
and demotic writings were entirely phonetic. It 
was therefore observed that the hieratic and 
demotic characters were abbreviations of the 
fuller pictures, and Brugsch, now the highest 
authority on the language, shows in his Grammar 
Demotique that demotic contains at least as many 
ideographic signs as hieratic writing. 
All these conjectures were first only applied to 
the characters inside the rings, but the difficulty 
remained of determining the order in which they 
were written. It was suggested that the charac- 
ters miglit be in the order of the Hebrew, Arabic, , 
etc., — from right to left, — or as in the modern \ 
systems — from left to right. This was settled by \ 
Champollion, for Mr. Banks, of England, liadj 
