82 



conspicuous quadruped or bird will fall a prey, whilst the smaller species might conceal 

 themselves and escape. Smaller quadrupeds are usually more prolific than larger ones. 

 The actual presence, therefore, of small species of animals in countries where the larger 

 species of the same natural families formerly existed, is not to be ascribed to any gradual 

 diminution of the size of such larger animals, but is the result of circumstances which 

 may be illustrated by the fable of the ' oak and the reed ;' the small animals have 

 bent and accommodated themselves to changes under which the larger species have 

 succumbed *." 



§ 11. Geological Summary. 



The first evidences of the great extinct quadruped which forms the subject of the 

 present Work, were received in Europe in 1789 ; they consisted of a considerable pro- 

 portion of the skeleton of a full-grown individual, which had been discovered " in some 

 excavations on the banks of the river Luxan, which flows close by the town of the same 

 name, about thirteen leagues W.S.W. of Buenos Ayres, in a ravine ten yards in depth, 

 which lies at a league and a half to the S.W. of the said townf:" and were transmitted 

 by His Excellency the Marquis of Loreto, Viceroy of Buenos Ayres, to the Koyal Mu- 

 seum of Natural History at Madrid. 



A considerable portion of a second skeleton of a Megatherium was transmitted from 

 Lima to the same museum in 1795. Parts of a third skeleton were, in the same year, 

 sent from Paraguay to the Padre Fernando Scio, of the 'Escuelas Pias^.' The parti- 

 cular circumstances attending the discovery of the last two specimens are not recorded. 

 The skeleton, mounted, from the foregoing materials, forms the subject of the work by 

 Bru and Garriga above cited, of the memoirs by Cuvier, and of the illustrations by 

 Pander and D' Alton, cited at p. 5. 



In 1823, a Prussian traveller in South America, Sellow, discovered in the bed of the 

 Queguay, Uruguay, part of the femur of a Megatherium : it is deposited in the Royal 

 Museum of Natural History at Berlin, and is noticed by Professor Weiss, in his Memoir 

 in the ' Berlin Transactions' for 1827, quoted at page 6 of the present Work. 



In 1824, Messrs. Mitchell and Cooper gave a brief notice of some bones and teeth 

 of the Megatherium, discovered in the pleistocene marl of the Skidaway Marshes, in the 

 State of New York, North America §. In the same year, Messrs. Waring and Haber- 

 shaw || obtained a few bones of the Megatherium from a like recent formation at l White- 

 Bluff,' Savannah. In 1831 an instructive proportion of the skeleton of a Megatherium, 

 including parts not preserved in the Madrid specimen, were discovered in the bed of 



• " On the genus Dinorni*'" (part 4), Transactions of the Zoological Society, vol. iv. p. 15 

 t " En las escavaciones que se hacian en las orillas del Eio Luxan, que corre immediato a la Villa de este 

 nombre (que esta a unas trece leguas O.S.O. de Buenos Ayres) en una baranca de diez varas de alto, que 

 e»ta a legua y media al O.S. de dicha Villa." — Descripcion del Esqueleto de un Quadrupedo muy corpulento 

 y raro, Ac., Don Joseph Gabbioa, Madrid, fol. 1796, ' Prologo.' 



X Ibid. § Annals of the Lyceum of New York, vol. i. p. 58. || Ibid. 



