326 
THE GEOLOGIST. 
species differing only from tlie European horse in the greater curva- 
ture of the molar teeth. These horses no doubt existed in herds, like 
the quaggas of South Africa, or like the wild asses of Central Asia. 
The same influences which promote the numerical increase of horses 
in South America at the present day, would have tended to promote 
a similar increase of the equine race in South America during the 
Pliocene period. The horse was first introduced in a.d. 1587, at 
Buenos Ayres ; forty-three years afterwards, in a.d. 1580, they were 
found at the Straits of Magellan. The cause why the horse, once 
numerous in America, became extinct centuries before the time of 
Columbus, at present baffles speculation. More significant is the 
fact, that we find in the Old World a three-toed fossil horse {Hip- 
parion) which by its annectant affinities to the earlier odd-toed her- 
bivores, has been supposed to be absolutely the ancestor of the pre- 
sent Equus cahallus. In the New World, however, no such form 
exists. Whence, then, on a derivative hypothesis, the horses of 
America ? 
Two tapirs are found, the one in the North, the other in South 
America; a dubious tapiriiie form has also been found at St. Louis, 
in Missouri, associated with fossils " of unquestionable Secondary 
date!" Pomel has erected this very suspicious type into a new 
genus, termed by him Menodus. It is not surprising that we should 
find tapirine forms in South America, when we reflect that the exist- 
ing tapir, or d'anta, is found over the whole Brazilian and Argentine 
Confederation, and from Guatemala to Patagonia. In the Panama 
and Chiriqui countries, the woolly tapir of tlie Andes, or Pinchaque,* 
also exists, a species far more nearly allied to the extinct races than 
the other American or than the Sumatran tapir. In the Andes ot 
South America, above the line of 6000 feet, the existing tapir is not 
found. 
A¥hen Castelnau was at Tarija, surrounded by fossil remains of 
mastodons, horses, macrauchenes, scelidotheres, llamas, and other 
mammalia, he was struck with the state of " fat, contented ignorance" 
in which the good Franciscan monks had arrived in geological know- 
ledge. The remains which he saw were all, according to them, proofs 
of the existence of a gigantic race of men who existed prior to the 
deluge. Padre Osorio, a Jesuit of Paraguay, had declared, in 1638, 
that he had seen with his own eyes, in the Gran Chaco, a race of 
men of the highest physical and mental cultivation so tall that the 
Jesuit with his upraised arms could scarcely touch their heads. 
Peradventure, these races belonged to the same stock with those In- 
dians of California, immortalized by Padre Fray Pedro Simon, who 
had ears so large that they served for canopies, and under each of 
them five or six men could find ample shelter; or they might be 
allied to those of a neighbouring province, who, when in need of 
repose, used to go to sleep beneath the waters of a lake on the banks 
of which they lived. Even the giants whom Osorio imagined, how- 
* Last summer, specimens of this species, which is hitherto unrepresented in our 
Natioual Museum, were to be sold in the streets of Panama for a dime = 6^/. English. 
