112 
REVIEW— BRIDGEWATER TREATISE. 
allied, in a greater degree than any other fossil animal exceeds its 
nearest living congeners. With the head and shoulders of a sloth, 
it combines in its legs and feet an admixture of the characters of 
the ant-eater, the armadillo, and the chlamyforus ; it, probably, 
also still further resembled the armadillo and chlamyphorus, in 
being cased with a bony armour. 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 gi- 
gantic claws ; its tail was probably clad in armour, and much 
larger than the tail of any other beast among extinct or living 
terrestrial mammalia. Thus heavily constructed, and ponderous- 
ly accoutred, it could neither run, nor leap, nor climb, nor bur- 
row under ground, and in all its movements must have been ne- 
cessarily slow. Rapid locomotion could be of no service to an 
animal who obtained its food by digging beneath a broiling sun : 
its occupation was altogether confined to digging roots for food, 
and therefore almost stationary ; and 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 conguar or the crocodile, there could be no 
need of speed for flight from foes. Secure within the panoply 
of his bony armour, where was the enemy that would dare en- 
counter this leviathan of the Pampas ? or in what more power- 
ful creature can we find the cause that has effected the extirpa- 
tion of his race ? 
His entire frame was an apparatus of colossal mechanism, 
adapted exactly to the work it had to do ; strong and ponderous, 
in proportion as this work was heavy ; 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 imperishable monuments of the 'consummate skill with 
which they w r ere constructed. Each limb, and fragment of a 
limb, forming co-ordinate parts of a well-adjusted and perfect 
whole ; and through all their deviations from the form and pro- 
portions of the limbs of other quadrupeds, affording fresh proofs 
of the infinitely varied and inexhaustible contrivances of Cre- 
ative Wisdom. K. 
Veterinary Students who have obtained their 
D IPLOMAS. 
January 2oth, 1837. 
Mr. J. M. Corbet, Kilsyth, Stirling. 
Mr. J. Waring, Liverpool. 
Mr. J. B. Jones, Worcester. 
Mr. H. Naylor, Worksop. 
