358 PICTURESQUE SKETCHES 



appearance, and their habits, as for their strange 

 analogies with the sloth and the armadillo. 



The sloth is well known and exceedingly common 

 in some of the forests of South America. It has 

 very long fore-legs, so constructed as to support the 

 animal when hanging on the under side of the branch 

 of a tree, and in this position it usually rests. It 

 never willingly descends to the earth, where the pe- 

 culiar form of its limbs prevents it from advancing 

 without great and painful efforts; but when on a 

 tree it moves rapidly and with ease, passing from 

 one branch to another, and getting from tree to tree 

 by the help of the numerous parasitical plants which 

 form a net-work uniting the upper branches of the 

 most lofty trees of the forest. The animal is not 

 provided with a tail, and the want of such an ap- 

 pendage is not felt, the bones of the extremities and 

 the powerful toes forming an ample support for the 

 creature whether moving or resting suspended from 

 a branch. 



It is curious and very interesting to see all the 

 most marked peculiarities of the skeleton, so far as 

 relates to the essential structure of this animal, trans- 

 ferred, on a gigantic scale, to some extinct species, 

 while at the same time the modifications observable 

 in the shortening and strengthening of the legs, and 

 the addition of a powerful tail, are quite enough to 

 convince the physiological naturalist that the actual 

 habits must have differed in spite of much essential 

 and important resemblance. 



One of these huge monsters has been well named 

 Megatherium;* and nearly every bone of its enor- 



* Meya (mega), great ; Orjpiov (therion), a beast. 



