It Belongs To The Same Division Of The Pachydermata
With The Rhinoceros, Tapir, And Palaeotherium; But
In The Structure Of
The bones of its long neck it shows a clear
relation to the camel, or rather to the guanaco and
Llama.
From recent sea-shells being found on two of the higher
step-formed plains, which must have been modelled and
upraised before the mud was deposited in which the Macrauchenia
was entombed, it is certain that this curious quadruped
lived long after the sea was inhabited by its present
shells. I was at first much surprised how a large quadruped
could so lately have subsisted, in lat. 49 degs. 15', on these
wretched gravel plains, with their stunted vegetation; but
the relationship of the Macrauchenia to the Guanaco, now
an inhabitant of the most sterile parts, partly explains this
difficulty.
The relationship, though distant, between the Macrauchenia
and the Guanaco, between the Toxodon and the
Capybara, - the closer relationship between the many extinct
Edentata and the living sloths, ant-eaters, and armadillos,
now so eminently characteristic of South American zoology,
- and the still closer relationship between the fossil and
living species of Ctenomys and Hydrochaerus, are most
interesting facts. This relationship is shown wonderfully - as
wonderfully as between the fossil and extinct Marsupial
animals of Australia - by the great collection lately brought
to Europe from the caves of Brazil by MM. Lund and Clausen.
In this collection there are extinct species of all the
thirty-two genera, excepting four, of the terrestrial quadrupeds
now inhabiting the provinces in which the caves occur;
and the extinct species are much more numerous than those
now living: there are fossil ant-eaters, armadillos, tapirs,
peccaries, guanacos, opossums, and numerous South American
gnawers and monkeys, and other animals. This wonderful
relationship in the same continent between the dead and
the living, will, I do not doubt, hereafter throw more light
on the appearance of organic beings on our earth, and their
disappearance from it, than any other class of facts.
It is impossible to reflect on the changed state of the
American continent without the deepest astonishment. Formerly
it must have swarmed with great monsters: now we
find mere pigmies, compared with the antecedent, allied
races. If Buffon had known of the gigantic sloth and
armadillo-like animals, and of the lost Pachydermata, he might
have said with a greater semblance of truth that the creative
force in America had lost its power, rather than that it had
never possessed great vigour. The greater number, if not all,
of these extinct quadrupeds lived at a late period, and were
the contemporaries of most of the existing sea-shells. Since
they lived, no very great change in the form of the land can
have taken place. What, then, has exterminated so many
species and whole genera? The mind at first is irresistibly
hurried into the belief of some great catastrophe; but thus
to destroy animals, both large and small, in Southern Patagonia,
in Brazil, on the Cordillera of Peru, in North America
up to Behring's Straits, we must shake the entire framework
of the globe.
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