274 



GEOLOGY. 



Fig. 165. 



been found, there is some difference of opinion among 

 naturalists as to the true character of the animal, some 

 supposing it to be much like an elephant, and others al- 

 lying it to the dugong, a swimming pachyderm, for the 

 description of which I refer you to my Natural History, 

 195. There is, in truth, in this strange animal, a mix- 

 ture of the peculiarities of the elephant, hippopotamus, 

 tapir, and dugong. If it be a quadruped, it is the largest 

 of all the quadrupeds that have lived on the globe, being 

 larger than even the mammoth and mastodon, hereafter 

 to be noticed. It was probably eighteen feet long. Its 

 skull is nearly four feet in length, its upper jaw being 

 shaped like that of the elephant, for the attachment of a 

 trunk. It had two enormous tusks on the lower jaw, 

 curving downward like those of the walrus. It proba- 

 bly lived chiefly in the water, like the hippopotamus. Its 

 diet, as we know by its teeth, was vegetable, and it un- 

 doubtedly used its tusks to tear up the roots of aquatic 

 plants by a rake-like action from the beds of rivers and 

 lakes. Perhaps, too, it used its tusks as hooks for draw- 

 ing its huge unwieldy body up banks, and even along 

 upon the ground if it had no real legs. 



385. Tertiary Mountain-making. There was, as you 

 have already seen, considerable mountain-making during 

 the Tertiary period, and therefore much change of eleva- 

 tion and flexure of the strata, with more or less of frac- 



