BLA.KE — PAST LIFE IN SOUTH AMEEICA. 
325 
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, CaUitlirix primcsvus. 
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 {EJephas primigenius and Texi- 
anus) 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 palaeothere, discovered by Mr. 
Darwin in Patagonia, and which at the same time bears some points 
of analogy, but not of afiinity, with the llamas. This animal, the 
Macrauclwnia, 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 stifl* 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 {Equns 
curvidens), the best known, because the first discovered, indicates a 
* An argument for the scientific recognition of the Confederate States might be founded 
upon the fact that their flora and fauna differ essentially from those of their more northern 
antagonists in the less fertile country north of the Ohio. The term " fauna of the United 
States" conveys no idea to the scientific mind. The term, to use Dr. Latham's expres- 
sion, " means so much as to meau nothing." 
