MAMMALIA—SLOTH. 265 
error in nature; for, even in the largest animals, and those whose nodies 
are relatively longer than they are thick, not one of them is found to have 
somany. ‘The elephant has only forty, the dog twenty-six, and the human 
species twenty-four, &c. This difference in the construgtion of the unau 
and the ai, supposes a greater distance between these two kinds than there 
is between that of the cat and the dog, which have the same number of ribs; 
for the external differences are nothing in comparison with the internal 
ones, which are the causes of the others. These animals inhabit South 
America, and are especially numerous in Brazil and Guiana. 
Waterton gives the following account of the sloth: “This singular animal 
is destined by nature to be produced, to live, and to die, in the trees; and, to 
do justice to him, naturalists must examine tim in his upper element. He 
is a scarce and solitary animal, and, being good food, he is never allowed to 
escape. He inhabits remote and gloomy forests, where snakes take up 
their abode, and where cruelly stinging ants and scorpions, and swamps, 
aud innumerable thorny shrubs and bushes, obstruct the steps of civilized 
nian. Were you to draw your own conclusions from the descriptions which 
have been given of the sloth, you would probably suspect that no naturalisi 
had actually gone into the wilds with the fixed determination to find him 
out and examine his haunts, and see whether nature has committed any 
blunder in the formation of this extraordinary creature, which appears to us 
se forlorn and miserable, so ill put together, and so totally unfit to enjoy the 
o4 
