SOUTH AMERICA. 
149 
I had paid great attention to this subject for above third 
fourteen years; still it would not do : however, one stuffing ~ 
nigdit, while I was lying; in the hammock, and bird ? and 
& J ° 1 quadru- 
liarping on the string on which hung all my solici- P eds - 
tude, I hit upon the proper mode by inference; it 
appeared clear to me that it was the only true way of 
going to work, and ere I closed my eyes in sleep, I 
was able to prove to myself that there could not be 
any other way that would answer. I tried it the 
next day, and succeeded according to expectation. 
By means of this process, which is very simple, 
we can now give every feature back again to the 
animal’s face, after it has been skinned ; and when 
necessary, stamp grief, or pain, or pleasure, or rage, 
or mildness upon it. But more of this hereafter. 
Let us now turn our attention to the Sloth, whose TheSioth. 
native haunts have hitherto been so little known, and 
probably little looked into. Those who have written 
on this singular animal, have remarked that he is in 
a perpetual state of pain, that he is proverbially slow 
in his movements, that he is a prisoner in space, and 
that as soon as he has consumed all the leaves of 
the tree upon which he had mounted, he rolls him¬ 
self up in the form of a ball, and then falls to the 
ground. This is not the case. 
If the naturalists who have written the history of 
the sloth had gone into the wilds, in order to examine 
his haunts and economy, they would not have drawn 
the foregoing conclusions ; they would have learned, 
that though all other quadrupeds may be described 
while resting upon the ground, the sloth is an 
