157 



It is not very probable that the Mylodon, if disabled and its skull fractured by 

 a blow received in conflict with another of its kind, would have been suffered to 

 escape : the victorious assailant would in all likelihood have followed up his ad- 

 vantage by a mortal wound, such as an irate Megatherium might easily have 

 inflicted with its sharp and ponderous claw, if excited by combative or destruc- 

 tive instincts. Nothing, however, that has yet reached us of the habits of exist- 

 ing Edentata would lead to the supposition that the extinct ones were actuated 

 by these instincts, or were characterized by less peaceful habits than those of 

 the Sloths, the Ant-eaters, and Armadillos of the present day. Only in self- 

 defence against the carnivorous Jaguar or Puma is the strong-clawed Ant-eater 

 {Myrmecophaga jubata) reported to use successfully its powerful weapons, with 

 the analogues of which a Mylodon or Megatherium might be conjectured to 

 have produced the injuries in our present fossil, on the combative hypothesis of 

 their origin. But in the conflict of the Great Ant-eater with the Jaguar, the 

 predatory assailant is overcome by the pertinacity of the grasp, not by the force 

 of the blow. The only analogies, therefore, by which we can test the conjecture 

 that the injuries in question were inflicted by another Megatherioid animal, di- 

 minish its probability. 



There is no certain or conclusive evidence that Human Beings coexisted 

 with the Megatherian animals : but assuming a primaeval race of Indians to 

 have disputed the lordship of the American forests with the Edentate giants, and 

 to have waged against them, as against all other inferior animals, a war of ex- 

 termination ; the same difliculty presents itself to the supposition of the recovery 

 and escape of a stunned Mylodon from their deadly assaults with clubs and 

 other weapons, as from the claws and teeth of the beast of prey : for the flesh of 

 the leaf-eating Megatherian would doubtless be as much prized for food by a 

 Human destroyer as that of the Sloth is by the Indians of the present day. 



With these difficulties, therefore, opposing themselves to the conjectures 

 which naturally rise in the mind at the first view of the injuries on the skull of 

 the extinct Mylodon, and which suggest the hostile attacks of some other 

 animal as their cause, we are compelled to refer those injuries to the effects of 

 some inanimate force, which, having felled the Mylodon and temporarily dis- 

 abled it, was spent, and could not follow up the blow. To a huge denizen of 

 the woods what accident more hkely to produce such injuries than the fall of a 



