.360 
PROFESSOR OWEN ON THE MEGATHERIUM. 
M. Abildgaard, a professor at Copenhagen, having had the opportunity of study- 
ing the skeleton of the Megatherium at Madrid in 1793, published a short notice of 
it in Danish, illustrated by a rude figure of the skull and of the hind limbs, and 
referred the species to the Bnita of Linn^us, an order afterwards modified to form 
the Edentis of Cuvier: this notice, though published the year after Cuvier’s Report, 
appears to have been independent of it, and the conclusions to be the result of the 
author’s own observations and reflections. It is, therefore, to be regarded as an 
additional testimony to the true affinities of the species. 
Cuvier’s comments on the figures in the engravings for Garriga’s memoir are 
accompanied by reduced copies of them, given in the above-cited volume of the 
‘ Annales du Museum,’ and afterwards in the fourth volume of the first edition of the 
‘ Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles,’ 4to, 1812. In both works Cuvier sums up 
his conclusions as to the habits and food of the Megatherium, as follows: — “Its 
teeth prove that it lived on vegetables, and its robust fore-feet armed with sharp 
claws, make us believe that it was principally their roots which it attacked. Its 
magnitude and its talons must have given it sufficient means of defence. It was not 
of swift course, nor was this requisite, the animal needing neither to pursue nor to 
escape*.” 
In the year 1821 Drs. Pander and D’Alton published their beautiful Monograph 
on the Megatherium, the result of personal examination and depiction of the then 
unique skeleton at Madrid ; they represent the bones more artistically and in more 
natural juxtaposition than in the plates of Bru’s memoir, but the subject being the 
same, the same deficiencies, to be presently specified, were unavoidable. 
As the accomplished and learned authors of the German work reasoned, like 
Abildgaard, from actual inspection of the fossil skeleton, their conclusions as to the 
nature, affinities and habits of the animal to which it belonged merit a respectful 
consideration. In it they recognize, with Cuvier, all the important points of resem- 
blance to the skeletons of the existing species of Sloth, of which they append excel- 
lent figures. But, imbued with the principles of the transcendental and transmuta- 
tive hypotheses, then prevalent in the schools of Germany, they regard the great Mega- 
therium and Megalonyx as being not merely predecessors but progenitors of those 
still lingering remnants of the tardigrade race, into which such ancestral giants are 
supposed to have dwindled down by gradual degeneration and alteration of characters. 
But they deem the living habits of the Megatherium to have been far different from 
those of its puny scansorial progeny: it was, in their opinion, a fossorial animal; 
and not merely an occasional digger of the soil, as Cuvier concluded, but altogether 
* “ Ses dents prouvent qu’il vivoit de vegetaux, et ses pieds de devant, robustes et armees d’ongles tranchans, 
nous fait croire que c’etoit principalement leurs racines qu’il attaquoit. Sa grandeur et ses griffes devoient lui 
fournir assez de moyens de defense. II n’etoit pas prompt a la course, mais cela ne lui etoit pas necessaire, 
n’ayant besoin ni de poursuivre ni de fuir.” Tom. cit. ' Sur le Megatherium,’ p. 29. See also the posthumous 
edition of the ‘ Ossemens Fossiles,’ 8vo, 1836, tom. viii. p. 363. 
