122 MAMMALIAN DESCENT. [Lect. IV. 



Lear's head and tongue have lengthened through the ages ; in 

 this he has gone on unto perfection. The Sloth, also, has cut olf, 

 not his right hand, but all his unnecessary fingers, during the long 

 secular period in which he has been slowly moving towards the 

 mark of his particular type of excellence, and his face has gone on 

 shortening, so that, although a long way below a IVIonkey, there 

 is something monkey-like in his curious short muzzle. 



Time, that unwearied harvest-man, has almost finished his mowmgs 

 in this held. Here and there, his two-handed engine has left a 

 patch of poorer stuff, a narrow headland of weaker, and later- 

 growth. The rest he has garnered and locked up safely, not, how- 

 ever, without letting fall here and there, as if by accident, a handful 

 or two, which the stranger from a far country has been too glad to 

 glean. But if Time has been so much against the modern biologist, 

 there was no reason why Xature (or "Wisdom, to use another image) 

 should have been so anxious to hide these types from us ; nothing 

 more perfect was ever developed by the morphological force. Here 

 one can speak great words, and yet not be hyperbolical ; the little 

 finger of the Megatherium was literally bigger than the sloth's loins, 

 and all the existing Armadillos (one of each) might be packed in 

 the body-case of a Glyptodon — the extinct Armadillo with sculptured 

 teeth. 



The largest Green Turtle would look a j^oor, shrunken thing beside 

 a living Glyptodon, a mean hero in a mean armour, not worth ten 

 oxen, but the Glyptoclon's armour could not be bought for a hiuidrecl 

 oxen. Yet that reptile-in-armour, in his own element, is like a swift 

 ship; the Glyptodon had to carry his suj)erb body-house on stumpy 

 legs; he must, in walking, have seemed like a huge bombard full of 

 liquor, that was being carried off by his oaken tressles or undersetters. 



If the Megatherium, or his somewhat more modest-sized relation 

 the Mylodon (another extinct Sloth), did find their supply of 

 food in the way palaeontologists suggest, their mode of dining must 

 have been a sight worth seeing. That delightful, typical English- 

 man, the late Rev. Sidney Smith, once reviewed Waterton's 

 Wanderings, and described the strange, grotesque, weird, unthought- 

 of creatures of the New Tropics. Would that he held the pen here, 

 now ! 



Let us, however, try to imagine a Megatherium waking up after 



