476 
VERTEBRATA. 
allied, in a greater degree than any other fossil aniraal exceeds its nearest living congeners. With 
the head and shoulders of a sloth, it comhined in its legs and feet an admixture of the characters 
of the ant-eater, the armadillo, and the chlamyphorus; it probably also still further resembled 
the armadillo and chlamyphorus, in being cased with a bony coat of armor.* Its haunches 
were more than five feet wide, and its body twelve feet long and eight feet high ; its feet were a 
yard in length, and terminated by most gigantic claws ; its tail was probably clad in armor, and 
much larger than the tail of any other beast among extmct or living terrestrial Mammalia. Thus 
heavily constructed, and ponderously accoutered, it could neither run, nor leap, nor climb, nor 
burrow under the ground, and in all its movements must have been necessarily slow ; but what 
need of rapid locomotion to an animal whose occupation of digging roots for food was almost 
stationary ? And what need of speed for flight from foes, to a creature whose giant carcass was 
encased in an impenetrable cuirass, and who, by a single pat of his paw, or lash of his tail, could 
in an instant have demolished the cougar or the crocodile? Secure within the panoply of his 
bony armor, where was the enemy that would dare encounter this leviathan of the Pampas; or in 
what more powerful creature can we find the cause that has effected the extirpation of his race ? 
His entire frame was an apparatus of colossal mechanism, adapted exactly to the work it had tc 
MEGATHERIUM RESTORED, ACCORDING TO THE DESIGNS OF W. HAWKlKS, 
do ; strong and ponderous, in proportion as this work was neavy, and calculated to be the vehicle 
of life and enjoyment to a gigantic race of quadrupeds, which, though they have ceased to be 
counted among the living inhabitants of our planet, have, in their fossil bones, left behind them 
* Since the delivery of these opimons it has been pretty clearly proved that the Megatherium had no such covering 
as is here supposed. 
