758 GEOLOGY. 



cured some remains discovered in the river Solado, which runs through the Pampas of 

 Buenos Ayres. After several unusually dry seasons the waters were lowered to an 

 extraordinary degree, and a skeleton was exposed standing upright in the bed of the 

 river. Two more were subsequently secured by the same party, and in 1839 the 

 interesting discovery was made of a nearly perfect adult megatherium, on the banks of 

 the Rio de la Matanza. There were all the vertebrae of the body, the ribs, the teeth, 

 the head, the legs, and every part excepting the tail and one foot, with a perfect young 

 one, so small that the epoch of destruction must have transpired almost immediately 

 after its birth. Mr. Darwin met with remains extensively in various parts of the great 

 Pampean formation ; and particularly, in one spot on the coast, near to Bahia Blanca, 

 he found imbedded in gravel and reddish mud, within the space of about two hundred 

 yards square, many bones of the megatherium, and the allied animals, the megalonyx, 

 mylodon and scelidotherium, all gigantic quadrupeds. The megalonyx had longer 

 and sharper claws, was somewhat smaller, but of the size of the ox. It was first 

 described by President Jefferson, from relics found in the nitre caverns of Virginia, 

 who entirely mistook its character, supposing it a carnivorous animal, an error which 

 prevailed till Cuvier established its analogies with the sloths. Of the mylodon, a closely 

 related animal of little inferior size, a skeleton, nearly perfect, obtained from the 

 neighbourhood of Buenos Ayres, measures eleven feet in length, and nine feet nine 

 inches for the circumference of the trunk. The scelidotherium, a creature of the same 

 order, was as large as the rhinoceros, and resembled in its structure the Cape ant-eater 

 and the armadilloes. What is most remarkable in these ancient inhabitants of the 

 American continent, and without a parallel, is the immense proportions of the extinct 

 megatheridfie, and the diminutive size of the existing related animals. 



Sivatherium. From the drift of the Sivalik hills, a sub-range of the Himalaya on the 

 southern side, Dr. Falconer and Captain Cautley have brought to light this extinct 

 animal, styled after the locality, which appears to form a link intermediate between the 

 ruminants and the pachydermata. The living creature probably resembled an immense 

 antelope or gnu, had two pairs of persistent horns cresting a short thick head, the struc- 

 ture of the snout indicating that it was furnished with a trunk. From the Sivalik hills 

 the remains of all the preceding animals noticed have been obtained, with the exception of 

 the megatheridae, with many specimens of large ruminants allied to the giraffe, camel, elk, 

 and deer. Collocated with them are the bones of a species of monkey, discovered also in 

 the tertiary deposits of France ; and of two or more species of the horse, resembling the 

 animal of the present day, but inferior in size, the largest not exceeding the zebra, and 

 the smallest being about equal to a Shetland pony. The fossil horse is widely distributed 

 through Europe and Asia. It is common also in North America, and was discovered by 

 Mr. Darwin in several Pampean deposits in the South. Yet the native horse of the 

 Western World vanished entirely from it, and remained utterly unknown there for ages 

 after the epoch of Man commenced. "Certainly," remarks the naturalist just named, 

 " it is a marvellous fact in the history of the mammalia, that in South America a native 

 horse should have lived and disappeared, to be succeeded in after ages by the countless 

 herds descended from the few introduced by the Spanish colonists." The history of the 

 Old World, as far as it has been developed, presents nothing analogous to this. 



Gigantic horned Elk. Of all the fossil ruminants, the stag with enormous antlers is 

 the most celebrated, belonging to a species now lost, which appears to have been more 

 common in Ireland than any where else, though found in England, Germany, France, on 

 the Rhine, in Silesia, and in Lombardy. A magnificent and almost entire skeleton has 

 been obtained from a bed of marl in the Isle of Man, at the depth of eighteen feet, and is 

 now preserved in the museum at Edinburgh. The dimensions are six feet high, nine 



