Oct 1833. 



ZOOLOGICAL PROVINCES. 



153 



This distinction of the two zoological provinces does not 

 appear always to have existed. At the present day the 

 order of Edentata is much more strongly developed in South 

 America^, than in any other part of the world : and concluding 

 from the fossil remains, which were discovered at Bahia 

 Blanca, such must have been the case during a former 

 epoch. In America, north of Mexico, not one of this order 

 is now found : yet, as is well known, the gigantic megalonyx, 

 considered by Cuvier as a species of Megatherium, has been 

 found only in that country ; and as it appears from recent 

 observations,"^ the Megatherium Cuvierii itself Hkewise 

 occurs there. Mr. Owen showed me the tibia of some 

 large animal, which Sir Philip Egerton had purchased 

 out of a collection of the remains of the mastodon brought 

 from North America. Mr. Owen says it certainly belongs 

 to one of the Edentata, and it so closely resembles a bone 

 which I found embedded, together with fragments of the 

 great armadillo-like covering, in Banda Oriental, that it 

 probably forms a species of the same genus. Lastly, among 

 the fossils brought home by Captain Beechey from the 

 N.W. coast, there was a cervical vertebra, which, when com- 

 pared by Mr. Pentlandf with the skeletons at Paris, was 

 found to resemble that of the sloth and anteater more than 

 that of any other animal, although having some points of 

 essential difference. 



Of the Pachydermata four or five species are now found in 

 America; but, as in the case of the Edentata, none are 

 peculiar to the continent north of Mexico ; and one alone 

 seems to exist there as a wanderer. Yet the account of the 

 multitude of bones of the mastodon and elephant, which 

 have been discovered in the salt-hcks of North America, is 

 famihar to every one. The remains of the Mastodon gigan- 

 teum have been found nowhere else; but those of the 

 Elephas primigenius are common to a large part of the 



* Ed. New Phil. Journal. July, 1828, p. 327. From a paper by Mr. 

 Cooper in the Lyceum of Natural History of New York, 

 -j- See Dr, Buckland. Appendix to Beechey's Voyage, p. 597. 



