viii CAUSES OF EXTINCTION 183 



great collection lately brought to Europe from the caves of 

 Brazil by MM. Lund and Clausen. In this collection there 

 are extinct species of all the thirty-two genera, excepting four, 

 of the terrestrial quadrupeds now inhabiting the provinces in 

 which the caves occur ; and the extinct species are much more 

 numerous than those now living : there are fossil ant-eaters, 

 armadilloes, tapirs, peccaries, guanacos, opossums, and numerous 

 South American gnawers and monkeys, and other animals. 

 This wonderful relationship in the same continent between the 

 dead and the living, will, I do not doubt, hereafter throw 

 more light on the appearance of organic beings on our earth, 

 and their disappearance from it, than any other class of 

 facts. 



It is impossible to reflect on the changed state of the 

 American continent without the deepest astonishment. Formerly 

 it must have swarmed with great monsters : now we find mere 

 pigmies, compared with the antecedent allied races. If Buffon 

 had known of the gigantic sloth and armadillo-like animals, and 

 of the lost Pachydermata, he might have said with a greater 

 semblance of truth that the creative force in America had lost 

 its power, rather than that it had never possessed great vigour. 

 The greater number, if not all, of these extinct quadrupeds 

 lived at a late period, and were the contemporaries of most of 

 the existing sea-shells. Since they lived, no very great change 

 in the form of the land can have taken place. What, then, 

 has exterminated so many species and whole genera? The 

 mind at first is irresistibly hurried into the belief of some great 

 catastrophe ; but thus to destroy animals, both large and small, 

 in Southern Patagonia, in Brazil, on the Cordillera of Peru, in 

 North America up to Behring's Straits, we must shake the 

 entire framework of the globe. An examination, moreover, of 

 the geology of La Plata and Patagonia, leads to the belief that 

 all the features of the land result from slow and gradual 

 changes. It appears from the character of the fossils in Europe, 

 Asia, Australia, and in North and South America, that those 

 conditions which favour the life of the larger quadrupeds were 

 lately coextensive with the world : what those conditions were, 

 no one has yet even conjectured. It could hardly have been 

 a change of temperature, which at about the same time destroyed 

 the inhabitants of tropical, temperate, and arctic latitudes on 



