84 BAHIA BLANCA. [cuar. v, 
not to say preposterous, idea to conceive even antediluvian trees, 
with branches strong enough to bear animals as large as ele- 
‘phants. Professor Owen, with far more probability, believes 
that, instead of climbing on the trees,-they pulled the branches 
down to them, and tore up the smaller ones by the roots, and so 
fed on the leaves. The colossal breadth and weight of their 
hinder quarters, which can hardly be imagined without having 
been seen, become, on this view, of obvious service, instead of 
being an incumbrance: their apparent clumsiness disappears. 
With their great tails and their huge heels firmly fixed like a 
tripod on the ground, they could freely exert the full force of 
their most powerful arms and great claws. Strongly rooted, 
indeed, must that tree have been, which could have resisted such 
force! The Mylodon, moreover, was furnished -with a long 
extensile tongue like that of the giraffe, which, by one of those 
beautiful provisions of nature, thus reaches with the aid of its 
long neck its leafy food. I may remark, that in Abyssinia the 
elephant, according to Bruce, when it cannot reach with its 
proboscis the branches, deeply scores with its tusks the trunk of 
the tree, up and down and all round, till it is sufficiently 
weakened to be broken down. 
The beds including the above fossil remains, stand only from 
fifteen to twenty feet above the level of high-water; and hence 
the elevation of the land has been small (without there has 
been an intercalated period of subsidence, of which we have no 
evidence) since the great quadrupeds wandered over the sur- 
rounding plains; and the external features of the country must 
then have been very nearly the same as now. What, it may natu- 
rally be asked, was the character of the vegetation at that period ; 
was the country as wretchedly sterile as it now is? As so many 
of the co-embedded shells are the same with those now living in 
the bay, I was at first inclined to think that the former vegeta- 
tion was probably similar to the existing one; but this would 
have been an erroneous inference, for some of these same shells 
live on the luxuriant coast of Brazil; and generally, the character 
of the inhabitants of the sea are useless as guides to judge of 
those on the land. Nevertheless, from the following considera- 
tions, Ido not believe that the simple fact of many gigantic 
quadrupeds having lived on the plains round Bahia Blanca, is 
