47G 



VERTEBRATA. 



allied, in a greater degree than any other fossil animal exceeds its nearest living congeners. With 

 the head and shoulders of a sloth, it combined in its legs and feet an admixture of the characters 

 of the ant-eater, the armadillo, and the chlamy phorus ; it probably also still further resembled 

 the armadillo and chlamyphorus, in being cased with a bony coat of armor.* Its haunches 

 were more than five feet wide, and its body twelve feet long and eight feet high ; its feet were a 

 yard in length, and terminated l>v most gigantic claws; its tail was probably clad in armor, ano 

 much larger than the tail of any other beast among extinct or living terrestrial Mammalia. Thus 

 heavily constructed, and ponderously accoutered, it could neither run, nor leap, nor climb, nor 

 burrow under the ground, and in all its movements must have been necessarily slow; but what 

 need of rapid locomotion to an animal whose occupation of digging roots for food was almost 

 stationary ? And what need of speed for flight from foes, to a creature whose giant carcass was 

 encased in an impenetrable cuirass, and who, by a single pat of his paw, or lash of his tail, could 

 in an instant have demolished the cougar or the crocodile? Secure within the panoply of hit 

 bony armor, where was the enemy that would dare encounter this leviathan of the Pampas; or in 

 what more powerful creature can we find the cause that has effected the extirpation of his race I 

 His entire frame was an apparatus of colossal mechanism, adapted exactly to the work it had t< 



MEGATHERIUM RESTORED, ACCORDING TO THE DESIGNS OP W. HAWKINS. 



do ; strong and ponderous, in proportion as this work was heavy, and calculated to be the vehicle 

 of life and enjoyment to a gigantic race of quadrupeds, which, though they have ceased to he 

 counted among the living inhabitants of our planet, have, in their fossil bones, left behind them 



* Since the delivery of these opinions it has been pretty clearly proved that the Megatherium had no such covering 

 as is here supposed. 



