13LA.KE — PAST LIFE IN SOUTH AMERICA. 



S25 



the possibility of its being contemporaneous with early man is ren- 

 dered more probable when we reflect that on the borders of Lake 

 Lagoa Santa, and at Minas Geraes, human remains have been found, 

 coupled with those of forty-four extinct animals, amongst which was 

 another large fossil ape, Callithrix py^imcevus. 



The extinct elephants and horses of America afford an interesting 

 source of contemplation to the reflective pala3ontologist. Existing 

 elephants, as is well known, are but of three species, those of Africa, 

 India, and Sumatra. Professor Owen has, however, pointed out that 

 our knowledge has been expanded by fossil evidences, and that during 

 the Pliocene period, elephants existed in Africa, India, Europe, China, 

 and Australia. Thus far there was little to surprise the practical 

 observer, who was accustomed to find a wider distribution of animal 

 life in the later Tertiary times than in the present day. But when 

 we learn that two species of elephant {Elephas primigenius and Texi- 

 aniis) and one species of Mastodon co-existed with each other, in 

 warm, temperate, and cold latitudes in North America, and that two 

 other so-called species of elephantine animal {Mastodon Andium and 

 M. Humholdtii) browsed on the trees of South America, prior to the 

 upheaval of the vast Andian chain of mountains, astonishment almost 

 verges into incredulity. " Well," it may be said, " since we have 

 thus evidence of American elephants, why may we not have evidence 

 of American rhinoceroses?" We have such proof of an animal 

 closely allied to the rhinoceros and palseothere, discovered by Mr. 

 Darwin in Patagonia, and which at the same time bears some points 

 of analogy, but not of affinity, with the llamas. This animal, the 

 Macrauchenia, has also been found on the eastern slopes of the Andes 

 at Tarija, and in the very heart of the Aymara country at Corocoro. 

 Imagination can scarcely conceive the period when this bulky brute, 

 with its long stiff neck, elevated straight upright, as in the guanaco, 

 contested the pastures of Patagonia and Bolivia with the llamas and 

 horses around it. Some reader will say, " I understood that horses 

 were first introduced on the American continent by the followers of 

 Columbus, and that when the aboriginal Americans first viewed the 

 mounted Spaniards, they regarded them as centaur-like monsters, or 

 almost as divinities." The horse, however, of various species, had 

 existed in the New World for countless centuries prior to the advent 

 of the Spanish conquerors : whether its extinction dated previous to 

 the human era is yet undemonstrated ; tradition even of its existence 

 had passed away long before the Columbian epoch. Various species 

 of these early American horses are known to us ; one from the Con- 

 federate States * of North America ; another from Bolivia ; a third 

 from Chile ; and a fourth from Patagonia. The last species {Equus 

 curvidens), the best known, because the first discovered, indicates a 



* An argument for the scientilie recognition of the Confederate States niigi)t he fonmleil 

 upon the fact that their llora and fauna diller essentially from those of their more northern 

 antagonists in the less fertile country north of the Ohio. Tlie term " fauna of the rniteJ 

 States" conveys no idea to the seientilic nnnd. The term, to use Dr. Latham's expres- 

 sion, " means so much as to mean iiothiug." 



