THE SLOTH 269 



It is a singular thing that an animal so strangely 

 built, and which could, one would think, defy the 

 attacks of almost any and every enemy, should have 

 become extinct. 



But if the glyptodons fail to offer us any indication of 

 the line of descent along which the sloths have travelled, 

 such is not the case with another most singular and 

 important group of animals, which have scattered their 

 huge remains broadcast over both North and South 

 America. 



In that, politically, most eventful year, 1789, there 

 arrived at the Royal Museum, in Madrid, an almost 

 perfect skeleton of a huge beast, the bones of which had 

 been found on the banks of the river Luxan, near 

 Buenos Ayres. The creature was of vast bulk, exceeding 

 in size every existing land-animal except the elephant* 

 and had its limbs been larger it would have surpassed 

 even the dimensions of the elephant. It measured full 

 thirteen feet from the front of the head to the end of the 

 tail, and it had a very strong tail, which was itself five feet 

 long. It inhabited those lands, the waters of which run 

 into the Rio de la Plata ; and similar forms have been 

 found in South Carolina and Georgia. The animal is 

 known as the Megatherium, and strange to say, in spite 

 of its immense bulk, and in spite of its having been 

 organised for walking on the ground, it was so like the 

 subject of this paper, that it was called a ground-sloth. 

 Such is especially the case with respect to certain points 

 in the formation of the skull, the shoulder-blade, and the 

 haunch bones. The fore-limbs were larger than the 

 hind-limbs, and had three immense claws attached to its 

 three middle digits, while there appears to have been but a 

 single large claw in the hind foot, which claw was 

 attached to the third toe. It seems to have walked on 



