150 



ST. FE. 



Oct. 1833. 



tance only of a few yards in the same earthy mass. No sen- 

 sible difference in their state of decay could be perceived ; 

 they were both tender^ and partially stained red. If the 

 horse did not coexist with the Toxodon^ the tooth must by 

 some accident^ not very easily understood^ have been em- 

 bedded within the last three centuries (the period of the in- 

 troduction of the horse)^ with the remains of those animals^ 

 which ages since perished, when the Pampas was covered by 

 the waters of the sea. Now, I may ask, will any one credit 

 that two teeth of nearly equal size, buried in the same sub- 

 stance close together, after a period of so vast an inequality, 

 could exist in the same condition of decay ? We must con- 

 clude otherwise. Certainly it is a marvellous event in the 

 history of animals, that a native kind should have disap- 

 peared* to be succeeded in after ages by the countless herds 

 introduced with the Spanish colonist ! But our surprise 

 should be modified when it is already known, that the re- 

 mains of the Mastodon angustidens (the tooth formerly al- 

 luded to as embedded near that of the horse, probably be- 

 longed to this species) have been found both in South Ame- 

 rica, and in the southern parts of Europe. 



With regard to North America, Cuvier saysf the Elephas 

 primigenius " has left thousands of its carcasses from Spain 

 to the shores of Siberia, and it has been found in the whole 

 of North America.'^ The fossil ox, in a like manner, he 

 writes,! is buried ^^dans toute la partie boreale des deux 

 continens, puisque on en a d'Allemagne, d' Italic, de Prussie, 

 de la Siberie occidentale et orientale, et de I'Amerique.^^ I 

 may here add that horses^ bones, mingled with those of the 

 mastodon, have several times been transmitted for sale from 

 North America to England ; but it has always been imagined, 

 from the simple fact of their being horses^ bones, that they 

 had been accidentally mingled with the fossils. Among the 



* I need not here state, that there is no kind of evidence to support the 

 behef, that a horse existed in America previously to the age of CoUimbus. 

 f Theory of the Earth, p. 281 (English translation). 

 X Ossemens Fossiles, vol. iv., p. 147. 



