LITOPTERNA AND PROTAPIRUS 
the true horses. The latest and most remarkable example is 
Macrauchenia, fossil parts of which were first brought by Dar- 
win from Patagonia. This animal must have looked somewhat 
like a camel, for its neck is very long and camel-like in its struc- 
ture. The feet are three-toed and built on the perissodactyl 
plan, yet with important differences; but the most remarkable 
singularity is to be found in the structure of the skull, where the 
opening for the nostrils is an egg-shaped aperture in the fore- 
head, almost between the eyes! Of course, this was covered 
with flesh, and the indications are that the external nostrils were 
at the end of a trunk, perhaps not very long. This macrauchene 
was evidently a dry-land animal, for its legs were long and slender, 
and its feet resembled those of hepparions, in one genus re- 
duced to a single large toe on each foot, asin the modern horse.” 
The nearest living relatives of the horses and zebras, thun- 
dering across the windy desert the very image of bold and active 
liberty and grace, are the small, retiring, ungainly 
tapirs, hiding in the swampy forests of the Tropics. 
In this startling contrast our imagination is thrown back to the 
steaming jungles of Tertiary times, when the forerunners of 
the perissodactyls could hardly be distinguished by such terms 
as now name their branches.*® Back to those Eocene days may 
be traced the family of the tapirs until it blends with the begin- 
nings of the lophiodons and palotheres (which presently died 
out), and of the more persistent Equide. From that time to 
this, through Protapirus of the Lower Miocene of Wyoming, 
and other later genera, the descent of the family is traceable 
with the certainty, but not the detail, of its equine cousins; and 
in all these ages it has hardly varied. Those of to-day exhibit 
little advance in structure of feet or teeth over their remote an- 
cestors; and in our tapirs we still have a fair copy of the early 
perissodactyls. Primitively, the pro-tapirs were scattered all 
over the world; but as the later Tertiary conditions slowly 
37! 
Tapirs. 
