1833.] FOOD OF LAKGE QUADRUPEDS. 70 



pulled the branches down to them, and tore up the smaller ones by 

 the roots, and so fed on the leaves. The colossal breadth and 

 weight of their hinder quarters, which can hardly be imagined 

 without having been seen, become, on this view, of obvious service, 

 instead of being an incuinbrauce : their apparent clumsiness dis- 

 appears. With their great tails and their huge heels firmly fixed 

 like a tripod on the ground, they could freely exert the full force 

 of their most powerful arms and great claws. Strongly rooted, 

 indeed, must that tree have been, which could have resisted such 

 force ! The Mylodon, moreover, was furnished with a long extensile 

 tongue like that of the giraffe, which, by one of those beautiful 

 provisions of nature, thus reaches with the aid of its long neck its 

 leafy food. I may remark, that in Abyssinia the elephant, accord- 

 ing to Bruce, when it cannot reach with its proboscis the branches, 

 deeply scores with its tusks the trunk of the tree, up and down 

 and all round, till it is sufficiently weakened to be broken down. 



The beds including the above fossil remains, stand only from 

 fifteen to twenty feet above the level of high- water; and hence the 

 elevation of the laud has been small (without there has been an 

 intercalated period of subsidence, of which we have no evidence) 

 since the great quadrupeds wandered over the surrounding plains ; 

 and the external features of the country must then have been very 

 nearly the same as now. What, it may naturally be asked, was the 

 character of the vegetation at that period; was the country as 

 wretchedly sterile as it now is? As so many of the co-embedded 

 shells are the same with those now living in the bay, I was at first 

 inclined to think that the former vegetation was probably similar 

 to the existing one ; but this would have been an erroneous infer- 

 ence, for some of these same shells live on the luxuriant coast of 

 Brazil ; and generally, the character of the inhabitants of the sea 

 are useless as guides to judge of those on the land. Nevertheless, 

 from the following considerations, I do not believe that the simple 

 fact of many gigantic quadrupeds having lived on the plains round 

 Bahia Blanca, is any sure guide that they formerly were clothed 

 with a luxuriant vegetation: I have no doubt that the sterile 

 country a little southward, near the Kio Negro, with its scattered 

 thorny trees, would support many and large quadrupeds. 



That large animals require a luxuriant vegetation, has been a 

 general assumption which has passed from one work to another ; 



