96 



CHARLES DARWIN 



idea to conceive even antediluvian trees, with branches 

 strong enough to bear animals as large as elephants. Profes- 

 sor Owen, with far more probability, believes that, instead 

 of climbing on the trees, they pulled the branches down to 

 them, and tore up the smaller ones by the roots, and so fed on 

 the leaves. The colossal breadth and weight of their hinder 

 quarters, which can hardly be imagined without having been 

 seen, become t on this view, of obvious service, instead of 

 being an incumbrance: their apparent clumsiness disappears. 

 With their great tails and their huge heels firmly fixed like 

 a tripod on the ground, they could freely exert the full force 

 of their most powerful arms and great claws. Strongly 

 rooted, indeed, must that tree have been> which could have 

 resisted such force ! The Mylodon, moreover, was furnished 

 with a long extensile tongue like that of the giraffe, which, 

 by one of those beautiful provisions of nature, thus reaches 

 with the aid of its long neck its leafy food. I may remark, 

 that in Abyssinia the elephant, according to Bruce, when it 

 cannot reach with its proboscis the branches, deeply scores 

 with its tusks the trunk of the tree, up and down and all 

 round, till it is sufficiently weakened to be broken down. 



The beds including the above fossil remains, stand only 

 from fifteen to twenty feet above the level of high-water; 

 and hence the elevation of the land has been small (without 

 there has been an intercalated period of subsidence, of which 

 we have no evidence) since the great quadrupeds wandered 

 over the surrounding plains; and the external features of 

 the country must then have been very nearly the same as 

 now. What, it may naturally be asked, was the character 

 of the vegetation at that period ; was the country as wretch- 

 edly sterile as it now is? As so many of the co-embedded 

 shells are the same with those now living in the bay, I was 

 at first inclined to think that the former vegetation was 

 probably similar to the existing one; but this would have 

 been an erroneous inference, for some of these same shells 

 live on the luxuriant coast of Brazil ; and generally, the 

 character of the inhabitants of the sea are useless as guides 

 to judge of those on the land. Nevertheless, from the fol- 

 lowing considerations, I do not believe that the simple fact 

 of many gigantic quadrupeds having lived on the plains 



