such enormous weight would have been consistent with the general structure of the 

 Megatherium : its columnar hind legs and colossal tail were calculated to give it due 

 support ; and the strength of the loins and ribs, being very much greater than in the 

 Elephant, seems to have been necessary for carrying so ponderous a cuirass as that 

 which we suppose to have covered the body." He next calls attention to the broad 

 and rough flattened surface of a part of the crest of the ileum, to the broad summits 

 of the spines of many vertebrae, and also to the superior convex portion of certain 

 ribs, on which the armour could rest, as affording " evidence of pressure, similar to 

 that we find on the analogous parts of the skeleton of the Armadillo, from which," 

 he remarks, "we might have inferred that the Megatherium also was covered with 

 heavy armour, even had no such armour been discovered near bones of this animal in 

 other parts of the same level district of Paraguay*." 



The estimable and justly celebrated author of the * Bridgewater Treatise,' notwith- 

 standing his bias for the hypothesis of the affinities of the Megatherium to the Arma- 

 dillos, enunciates his conclusion with philosophic caution, and affirms that the other 

 " remarkable character of the Megatherium, in which it approaches most nearly to 

 the Armadillo and Chlamyphorus, consists in its hide having probably been covered 

 with a bony coat of armour, varying from three-fourths of an inch to an inch and a 

 half in thickness -f-." In the same work is given an original figure of the pelvis and 

 hind limb of the Megatherium, from a front view of those specimens in the Museum 

 of the College of Surgeons. 



M. Laurillard, in the posthumous edition of the ' Ossemens Fossiles' of Cuvier, 

 published in 1836, whilst admitting it to be very possible for the Megatherium to 

 have been covered by a cuirass, appends a note of warning against too hastily attri- 

 buting to that animal the fragments of the gigantic osseous armour that had been 

 found in the same formations of South America ; because, in the casts of some of the 

 bones which were transmitted with that armour by Sir Woodbine Parish, M. Lau- 

 rillard had recognized a calcaneum, an astragalus and a scaphoid, differing from 

 those of the living Armadillos only by their size and by some merely specific modifi- 

 cations X- 



But that which Baron Cuvier and M. Laurillard had ventured to regard as 

 very possible, and Dr. Buckland as probable, M. de Blainville a few years later 

 announced to be a positive fact. He communicated, in 1839, to the Academy of 

 Sciences of the French Institute, a statement that bones of the Megatherium had 

 recently been discovered, accompanied with fragments of a carapace belonging in- 

 dubitably to the same animal; and he adds that the association of a bony armour 

 with the internal skeleton of the Megatherium can be demonstrated as surely by 

 d. priori reasoning as by the h. posteriori fact ; but he adduces no observations or 



* Geology and Mineralogy considered with reference to Natural Theology, vol. i. pp. 160 and 161. 



t Ibid. p. 159. 



J Recherches sur lea Ossemens Fossiles, 8vo, 1836, torn. viii. p. 354. 



