The World Before the Deluge Part 31

Some learned pedant declared that the bones found in Italy and France were the remains of the Elephants which Hannibal brought from Carthage with the army in his expedition against the Romans. The part of France where the most ancient bones of these Elephants were found is in the environs of the Rhone, and consequently on the route of the Carthaginian general, and this consideration appeared to these terrible savants to be a particularly triumphant answer to the naturalist's reasoning. Again, at a later period, Domitius aen.o.barbus conducted the Carthaginian armies, which were followed by a number of Elephants, armed for war. Cuvier scarcely took the trouble to refute this insignificant objection. It is merely necessary to read, in his learned dissertation, of the number of elephants which could remain to Hannibal when he had entered Gaul.

But the best reply that can be made to this strange objection raised by the learned, is to show how extensively these fossil bones of Elephants are scattered, not in Europe only, but over the world--there are few regions of the globe in which their remains are not found. In the north of Europe, in Scandinavia, in Ireland, in Belgium, in Germany, in Central Europe, in Poland, in Middle Russia, in South Russia, in Greece, in Italy, in Africa, in Asia, and, as we have seen, in England. In the New World remains of the Mammoth are also met with. What is most singular is that these remains exist more especially in great numbers in the north of Europe, in the frozen regions of Siberia--regions altogether uninhabitable for the Elephant in our days. "There is not,"

says Pallas, "in all Asiatic Russia, from the Don to the extremity of the promontory of Tchutchis, a stream or river, especially of those which flow in the plains, on the banks of which some bones of Elephants and other animals foreign to the climate have not been found. But in the more elevated regions, the primitive and schistose chains, they are wanting, as are marine petrifactions. But in the lower slopes and in the great muddy and sandy plains, above all, in places which are swept by rivers and brooks, they are always found, which proves that we should not the less find them throughout the whole extent of the country if we had the same means of searching for them."

Every year in the season when thaw takes place, the vast rivers which descend to the Frozen Ocean in the north of Siberia sweep down with their waters numerous portions of the banks, and expose to view bones buried in the soil and in the excavations left by the rus.h.i.+ng waters.

Cuvier gives a long list of places in Russia in which interesting discoveries have been made of Elephants' bones; and it is certainly curious that the more we advance towards the north in Russia the more numerous and extensive do the bone depositories become. In spite of the oft-repeated and undoubted testimony of numerous travellers, we can scarcely credit the statements made respecting some of the islands of the glacial sea near the poles, situated opposite the mouth of the Lena and of the Indighirka. Here, for example, is an extract from "Billing's Voyage" concerning these isles: "The whole island (which is about thirty-three leagues in length), except three or four small rocky mountains, is a mixture of ice and sand; and as the sh.o.r.es fall, from the heat of the sun's thawing them, the tusks and bones of the mammont are found in great abundance. To use Chvoinoff's own expression, the island is formed of the bones of this extraordinary animal, mixed with the horns and heads of the buffalo, or something like it, and some horns of the rhinoceros."

New Siberia and the Lachow Islands off the mouth of the river Lena, are, for the most part, only an agglomeration of sand, ice, and Elephants'

teeth. At every tempest the sea casts ash.o.r.e new quant.i.ties of mammoths'

tusks, and the inhabitants of Siberia carry on a profitable commerce in this fossil ivory. Every year, during the summer, innumerable fishermen's barks direct their course towards this _isle of bones_; and, during winter, immense caravans take the same route, all the convoys drawn by dogs, returning charged with the tusks of the Mammoth, each weighing from 150 to 200 pounds. The fossil ivory thus withdrawn from the frozen north is imported into China and Europe, where it is employed for the same purposes as ordinary ivory, which is furnished, as we know, by the existing Elephant and Hippopotamus of Africa and Asia.

The _Isle of Bones_ has served as a quarry of this valuable material, for export to China, for 500 years; and it has been exported to Europe for upwards of 100. But the supply from these strange diggings apparently remains practically undiminished. What a number of acc.u.mulated generations of these bones and tusks does not this profusion imply!

It was in Siberia that the fossil Elephant received the name of the _Mammoth_, and its tusks that of _mammoth horns_. The celebrated Russian savant, Pallas, who gave the first systematic description of the Mammoth, a.s.serts that the name is derived from the word _mama_, which in the Tartar idiom signifies the _earth_. According to others, the name is derived from _behemoth_, mentioned in the Book of Job; or from the epithet _mahemoth_, which the Arabs add to the word "elephant," to designate one of unusual size. A curious circ.u.mstance enough is, that this same legend of an animal living exclusively under ground, exists amongst the Chinese. They call it _tien-schu_, and we read, in the great Chinese work on natural history, which was written in the sixteenth century: "The animal named _tien-schu_, of which we have already spoken in the ancient work upon the ceremonial ent.i.tled "Lyki"

(a work of the fifth century before Jesus Christ), is called also _tyn-schu_ or _yn-schu_, that is to say, _the mouse which hides itself_.

It always lives in subterranean caverns; it resembles a mouse, but is of the size of a buffalo or ox. It has no tail; its colour is dark; it is very strong, and excavates caverns in places full of rocks, and forests." Another writer, quoting the same pa.s.sage, thus expresses himself: "The _tyn-schu_ haunts obscure and unfrequented places. It dies as soon as it is exposed to the rays of the sun or moon; its feet are short in proportion to its size, which causes it to walk badly. Its tail is a Chinese ell in length. Its eyes are small, and its neck short. It is very stupid and sluggish. When the inundations of the river _Tamschuann-tuy_ took place (in 1571), a great many tyn-schu appeared in the plain; it fed on the roots of the plant _fu-kia_."

The existence in Russia of the bones and tusks of the Mammoth is sufficiently confirmed by the following extract from an old Russian traveller, Ysbrants Ides, who, in 1692, was sent by Peter the Great as amba.s.sador to the Emperor of China. In the extract which follows, we remark the very surprising fact of the discovery of a head and foot of the Mammoth which had been preserved in ice with all the flesh. "Amongst the hills which are situate north-east of the river Kata," says the traveller, "the Mammuts' tongues and legs are found, as they are also particularly on the sh.o.r.es of the river Jenize, Trugan, Mongamsea, Lena, and near Jakutskoi, even as far as the Frozen Ocean. In the spring, when the ice of this river breaks, it is driven in such vast quant.i.ties and with such force by the high swollen waters, that it frequently carries very high banks before it, and breaks off the tops of hills, which, falling down, discover these animals whole, or their teeth only, almost frozen to the earth, which thaw by degrees. I had a person with me who had annually gone out in search of these bones; he told it to me as a real truth, that he and his companions found the head of one of these animals, which was discovered by the fall of such a frozen piece of earth. As soon as he opened it, he found the greatest part of the flesh rotten, but it was not without difficulty that they broke out his teeth, which were placed in the fore-part of his mouth, as those of the Elephants are; they also took some bones out of his head, and afterwards came to his fore-foot, which they cut off, and carried part of it to the city of Trugan, the circ.u.mference of it being as large as that of the waist of an ordinary man. The bones of the head appeared somewhat red, as though they were tinctured with blood.

"Concerning this animal there are very different reports. The heathens of Jakuti, Tungusi, and Ostiacki, say that they continually, or at least, by reason of the very hard frosts, mostly live under ground, where they go backwards and forwards; to confirm which they tell us, that they have often seen the earth heaved up when one of these beasts was upon the march, and after he was pa.s.sed, the place sink in, and thereby make a deep pit. They further believe, that if this animal comes so near to the surface of the frozen earth as to smell the air, he immediately dies, which they say is the reason that several of them are found dead on the high banks of the river, where they unawares came out of the ground.

"This is the opinion of the Infidels concerning these beasts, which are never seen.

"But the old Siberian Russians affirm, that the Mammuth is very like the Elephant, with this difference only, that the teeth of the former are firmer, and not so straight as those of the latter. They also are of opinion that there were Elephants in this country before the Deluge, when this climate was warmer, and that their drowned bodies, floating on the surface of the water of that flood, were at last washed and forced into subterranean cavities; but that after this universal deluge, the air, which before was warm, was changed to cold, and that these bones have lain frozen in the earth ever since, and so are preserved from putrefaction till they thaw, and come to light, which is no very unreasonable conjecture, though it is not absolutely necessary that this climate should have been warmer before the Flood, since the carcases of the drowned elephants were very likely to float from other places several hundred miles distant to this country in the great deluge which covered the surface of the whole earth. Some of these teeth, which doubtless have lain the whole summer on the sh.o.r.e, are entirely black and broken, and can never be restored to their former condition. But those which are found in good case, are as good as ivory, and are accordingly transported to all parts of Muscovy, where they are used to make combs, and all other such-like things, instead of ivory.

"The above-mentioned person also told me that he once found two teeth in one head that weighed above twelve Russian pounds, which amount to four hundred German pounds; so that these animals must of necessity be very large, though a great many lesser teeth are found. By all that I could gather from the heathens, no person ever saw one of these beasts alive, or can give any account of its shape; so that all we heard said on this subject arises from bare conjecture only."

It is possible this recital may seem suspicious to some readers. We have ourselves felt some difficulty in believing that this head and foot were taken from the ice, with the flesh and skin, when we consider that the animal to which they belonged has been extinct probably more than ten thousand years. But the a.s.sertion of Ysbrants Ides is confirmed by respectable testimony of more recent date. In 1800, a Russian naturalist, Gabriel Sarytschew, travelled in northern Siberia. Having arrived in the neighbourhood of the Frozen Ocean, he found upon the banks of the Alasia, which discharges itself into this sea, the entire body of a Mammoth enveloped in a ma.s.s of ice. The body was in a complete state of preservation, for the permanent contact of the ice had kept out the air and prevented decomposition. It is well known that at zero and below it, animal substances will not putrefy, so that in our households we can preserve all kinds of animal food as long as we can surround them with ice; and this is precisely what happened to the Mammoth found by Gabriel Sarytschew in the ice of the Alasia. The rolling waters had disengaged the ma.s.s of ice which had imprisoned the monstrous pachyderm for thousands of years. The body, in a complete state of preservation and covered with its flesh as well as its entire hide, to which long hairs adhered in certain places, found itself, again, nearly erect on its four feet.

The Russian naturalist Adams, in 1806, made a discovery quite as extraordinary as the preceding. We borrow his account from a paper by Dr. Tilesius in the "Memoirs of the Imperial Academy of Sciences of St.

Petersburg" (vol. v.). In 1799, a Tungusian chief, Ossip Schumachoff, while seeking for mammoth-horns on the banks of the lake Oncoul, perceived among the blocks of ice a shapeless ma.s.s, not at all resembling the large pieces of floating wood which are commonly found there. The following year he noticed that this ma.s.s was more disengaged from the blocks of ice, and had two projecting parts, but he was still unable to make out what it could be. Towards the end of the following summer one entire side of the animal and one of his tusks were quite free from the ice. But the succeeding summer of 1802, which was less warm and more windy than common, caused the Mammoth to remain buried in the ice, which had scarcely melted at all. At length, towards the end of the fifth year (1803), the ice between the earth and the Mammoth having melted faster than the rest, the plane of its support became inclined; and this enormous ma.s.s fell by its own weight on a bank of sand. In the month of March, 1804, Schumachoff cut off the horns (the tusks), which he exchanged with the merchant Bultenof for goods of the value of fifty roubles (not quite eight pounds sterling). It was not till two years after this that Mr. Adams, of the St. Petersburg Academy, who was travelling with Count Golovkin, sent by the Czar of Russia on an emba.s.sy to China, having been told at Jakutsk of the discovery of an animal of extraordinary magnitude on the sh.o.r.es of the Frozen Ocean, near the mouth of the river Lena, betook himself to the place. He found the Mammoth still in the same place, but altogether mutilated. The Jakoutskis of the neighbourhood had cut off the flesh, with which they fed their dogs; wild beasts, such as white bears, wolves, wolverines, and foxes, had also fed upon it, and traces of their footsteps were seen around. The skeleton, almost entirely cleared of its flesh, remained whole, with the exception of one fore-leg. The spine of the back, one scapula, the pelvis, and the other three limbs were still held together by the ligaments and by parts of the skin; the other scapula was found not far off. The head was covered with a dry skin; one of the ears was furnished with a tuft of hairs; the b.a.l.l.s of the eyes were still distinguishable; the brain still occupied the cranium, but seemed dried up; the point of the lower lip had been gnawed and the upper lip had been destroyed so as to expose the teeth; the neck was furnished with a long flowing mane; the skin, of a dark-grey colour, covered with black hairs and a reddish wool, was so heavy that ten persons found great difficulty in transporting it to the sh.o.r.e. There was collected, according to Mr. Adams, more than thirty-six pounds' weight of hair and wool which the white bears had trod into the ground, while devouring the flesh. This Mammoth was a male so fat and well fed, according to the a.s.sertion of the Tungusian chief, that its belly hung down below the joints of its knees. Its tusks were nine feet six inches in length, measured along the curve, and its head without the tusks weighed 414 pounds avoirdupois.

Mr. Adams took every care to collect all that remained of this unique specimen of an ancient creation, and forwarded the parts to St.

Petersburg, a distance of 11,000 versts (7,330 miles). He succeeded in re-purchasing what he believed to be the tusks at Jakutsk, and the Emperor of Russia, who became the owner of this precious relic, paid him 8,000 roubles. The skeleton is deposited in the Museum of the Academy of St. Petersburg, and the skin still remains attached to the head and the feet. "We have yet to find," says Cuvier, "any individual equal to it."

[Ill.u.s.tration: XXVI.--Skeleton of the Mammoth in the St. Petersburg Museum.]

Beside the skeleton of this famous Mammoth there is placed that of an Indian Elephant, and another Elephant with skin and hair, in order that the visitor may have a proper appreciation of the vast proportions of the Mammoth, as compared with them. PLATE XXVI., on the opposite page, represents the saloon of the Museum of St. Petersburg, which contains these three interesting remains.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 182.--Mammoth restored.]

In 1860 a great number of bones of the Mammoth, with remains of Hyaena, Horse, Reindeer, Rhinoceros-megarhinus, and Bison, were found in Belgium in digging a ca.n.a.l at Lierre, in the province of Antwerp. An entire skeleton of a young Mammoth, eleven feet six inches high (to the shoulder), has been reconstructed from these remains by M. Dupont, and is now placed in the Royal Museum of Natural History in Brussels.[98]

[98] H. Woodward, _Geological Magazine_, vol. viii., p. 193.

We cannot doubt, after such testimony, of the existence in the frozen north, of the almost entire remains of the Mammoth. The animals seem to have perished suddenly; enveloped in ice at the moment of their death, their bodies have been preserved from decomposition by the continued action of the cold. If we suppose that one of those animals had sunk into a marsh which froze soon afterwards, or had fallen accidentally into the creva.s.se of some glacier, it would be easy for us to understand how its body, buried immediately under eternal ice, had remained there for thousands of years without undergoing decomposition.

In Cuvier's great work on _fossil bones_, he gives a long and minute enumeration of the various regions of Germany, France, Italy, and other countries, which have furnished in our days bones or tusks of the Mammoth. We venture to quote two of these descriptions:--"In October, 1816," he says, "there was discovered at Seilberg, near Canstadt, in Wurtemberg, near which some remarkable discoveries were made in 1700, a very remarkable deposit, which the king, Frederick I., caused to be excavated, and its contents collected with the greatest care. We are even a.s.sured that the visit which the prince, in his ardour for all that was great, paid to this spot, aggravated the malady of which he died a few days after. An officer, Herr Natter, commenced some excavations, and in four-and-twenty hours discovered twenty-one teeth or fragments of teeth of elephant, mixed with a great number of bones. The king having ordered him to continue the excavations, on the second day they came upon a group of thirteen tusks heaped close upon each other, and along with them some molar teeth, lying as if they had been packed artificially. It was on this discovery that the king caused himself to be transported thither, and ordered all the surrounding soil to be dug up, and every object to be carefully preserved in its original position.

The largest of the tusks, though it had lost its points and its roots, was still eight feet long and one foot in diameter. Many isolated tusks were also found, with a quant.i.ty of molar teeth, from two inches to a foot in length, some still adhering to the jaws. All these fragments were better preserved than those of 1700, which was attributed to the depth of the bed, and, perhaps, to the nature of the soil. The tusks were generally much curved. In the same deposit some bones of Horses and Stags were found, together with a quant.i.ty of teeth of the Rhinoceros, and others which were thought to belong to a Bear, and one specimen which was attributed to the Tapir. The place where this discovery was made is named Seilberg; it is about 600 paces from the city of Canstadt, but on the opposite side of the Necker.

"All the great river basins of Germany have, like those of the Necker, yielded fossil bones of the Elephant; those especially ab.u.t.ting on the Rhine are too numerous to be mentioned, nor is Canstadt the only place in the valley of the Necker where they are found."

But of all parts of Europe, that in which they are found in greatest numbers is the valley of the Upper Arno. We find there a perfect cemetery of Elephants. These bones were at one time so common in this valley, that the peasantry employed them, indiscriminately with stones, in constructing walls and houses. Since they have learned their value, however, they reserve them for sale to travellers.

The bones and tusks of the Mammoth are met with in America as well as in the Old World, scattered through Canada, Oregon, and the Northern States as far south as the Gulf of Mexico. Cuvier enumerates several places on that continent where their remains are met with, mingled with those of the Mastodon. The Russian Lieutenant Kotzebue found them on the north coast of America, in the cliffs of frozen mud in Eschsholtz Bay, within Behring's Strait, and in other distant parts of the sh.o.r.es of the Arctic Seas, where they were so common that the sailors burnt many pieces in their fires.

It is very strange that the East Indies, that is, one of the only two regions which is now the home of the Elephant, should be almost the only country in which the fossil bones of these animals have not been discovered. In short, from the preceding enumeration, it appears that, during the geological period whose history we are recording the gigantic Mammoth inhabited most regions of the globe. Now-a-days, the only climates which are suited for the existing race of Elephants are those of Africa and India, that is to say, tropical countries; from which we must draw the conclusions to which so many other inferences lead, that, at the epoch in which these animals lived, the temperature of the earth was much higher than in our days; or, more probably, the extinct race of Elephants must have been adapted for living in a colder climate than that which they now require.

Among the antediluvian Carnivora, one of the most formidable seems to have been the _Ursus spelaeus_, or Cave-bear (Fig. 183). This species must have been a fifth, if not a fourth, larger than the Brown Bear of our days. It was also more squat: some of the skeletons we possess are from nine to ten feet long, and only about six feet high. The _U.

spelaeus_ abounded in England, France, Belgium, and Germany; and so extensively in the latter country, that the teeth of the antediluvian Bear, as we have already stated, formed for a long time part of its materia medica, under the name of _fossil licorn_. Fig. 183 represents the skull of the Cave-bear.

At the same time with the _Ursus spelaeus_ another Carnivore, the _Felis spelaeus_, or Cave-lion, lived in Europe. This animal is specifically identical with the living Lion of Asia and Africa: but since in these early times he had not to contend with the hunter for food, he was, on the whole, considerably larger than any Lion now existing on the earth.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 183.--Head of Ursus spelaeus.]

The Hyaenas of our age consist of two species, the striped and the spotted Hyaenas. The last presents considerable conformity in its structure with that of the Post-pliocene period, which Cuvier designates under the name of the fossil Spotted Hyaena. It seems to have been only a little larger than the existing species. Fig. 184 represents the head of the _Hyaena spelaea_, whose remains, with those of others, were found in the caves of Kirkdale and Kent's Hole; the remains of about 300 being found in the former. Dr. Buckland satisfied himself, from the quant.i.ty of their dung, that the Hyaenas had lived there. In the cave were found remains of the ox, young elephant, rhinoceros, horse, bear, wolf, hare, water-rat, and several birds. All the bones present an appearance of having been broken and gnawed by the teeth of the Hyaenas, and they occur confusedly mixed in loam or mud, or dispersed through the crust of stalagmite which covered the contents of the cave.

The Horse dates from the Quaternary epoch, if not from the last period of the Tertiary epoch. Its remains are found in the same rocks with those of the Mammoth and the Rhinoceros. It is distinguished from our existing Horse only by its size, which was smaller--its remains abound in the Post-pliocene rocks, not only in Europe, but in America; so that an aboriginal Horse existed in the New World long before it was carried thither by the Spaniards, although we know that it was unknown at the date of their arrival. "Certainly it is a marvellous fact in the history of the Mammalia, that in South America, a native horse should have lived and disappeared, to be succeeded in after ages by the countless herds descended from the few introduced with the Spanish colonists!"[99]

[99] "Darwin's Journal," p. 130.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 184.--Head of Hyaena spelaea.]

The Oxen of the period, if not identical with, were at least very near to our living species. There were three species: the _Bison priscus_, _B. primigenius_, and _B. Pallasii_; the first with slender legs, with convex frontal, broader than it was high, and differing but slightly from the _Aurochs_, except in being taller and by having larger horns.

The remains of _Bison priscus_ are found in England, France, Italy, Germany, Russia, and America. _Bison primigenius_ was, according to Cuvier, the source of our domestic cattle. The _Bos Pallasii_ is found in America and in Siberia, and resembles in many respects the Musk-ox of Canada.

Where these great Mammals are found we generally discover the fossil remains of several species of Deer. The palaeontological question as regards these animals is very obscure, and it is often difficult to determine whether the remains belong to an extinct or an existing species. This doubt does not extend, however, to the gigantic forest-stag, _Cervus megaceros_, one of the most magnificent of the antediluvian animals, whose remains are still frequently found in Ireland in the neighbourhood of Dublin; more rarely in France, Germany, Poland, and Italy. Intermediate between the Fallow-deer and the Elk, the _Cervus megaceros_ partakes of the Elk in its general proportions and in the form of its cranium, but it approaches the Fallow-deer in its size and in the disposition of its horns. These magnificent appendages, however, while they decorated the head of the animal and gave a most imposing appearance to it, must have sadly impeded its progress through the thick and tangled forests of the ancient world. The length of these horns was between nine and ten feet; and they were so divergent that, measured from one extremity to the other, they occupied a s.p.a.ce of between three and four yards.

The skeleton of the _Cervus megaceros_ is found in the deposits of calcareous tufa, which underlie the immense peat moss of Ireland; sometimes in the turf itself, as near the Curragh in Kildare; in which position they sometimes occur in little mounds piled up in a small s.p.a.ce, and nearly always in the same att.i.tude, the head aloft, the neck stretched out, the horns reversed and thrown downwards towards the back, as if the animal, suddenly immersed into marshy ground, had been under the necessity of throwing up its head in search of respirable air. In the Geological Cabinet of the Sorbonne, at Paris, there is a magnificent skeleton of _Cervus megaceros_; another belongs to the College of Surgeons in London; and there is a third at Vienna.

The most remarkable creatures of the period, however, were the great Edentates--the Glyptodon, the gigantic Megatherium, the Mylodon and the Megalonyx. The order of Edentates is more particularly characterised by the absence of teeth in the fore part of the mouth. The masticating apparatus of the Edentates consists only of molars, the incisors and canine teeth being, with a few exceptions, absent altogether, as the animals composing this order feed chiefly on insects or the tender leaves of plants. The Armadillo, Anteater and Pangolin, are the living examples of the order. We may add, as still further characteristics, largely developed claws at the extremities of the toes. The order seems thus to establish itself as a zoological link in the chain between the hoofed Mammals and the ungulated animals, or those armed with claws.

All these animals are peculiar to the continent of America.

The _Glyptodon_, which appears during the Quaternary period, belonged to the family of Armadilloes, and their most remarkable feature was the presence of a hard, scaly sh.e.l.l, or coat of mail six feet in length, and composed of numerous segments, which covered the entire upper service of the animal from the head to the tail. It was, in short, a mammiferous animal, which appears to have been enclosed in a sh.e.l.l like that of a Turtle; it resembled in many respects the _Dasypus_ or Anteater, and had sixteen teeth in each jaw. These teeth were channelled laterally with two broad and deep grooves, which divided the surface of the molars into three parts, whence it was named the Glyptodon. The hind feet were broad and ma.s.sive, and evidently designed to support a vast inc.u.mbent ma.s.s; it presented phalanges armed with short thick and depressed nails or claws.

The animal was, as we have said, enveloped in, and protected by, a cuira.s.s, or solid carapace, composed of plates which, seen from beneath, appeared to be hexagonal and united by denticulated sutures: above they represented double rosettes. The habitat of _Glyptodon clavipes_ was the pampas of Buenos Ayres, and the banks of an affluent of the Rio Santo, near Monte Video; specimens have been found not less than nine feet in length.

The tesselated carapace of the Glyptodon was long thought to belong to the Megatherium; but Professor Owen shows, from the anatomical structure of the two animals, that the cuira.s.s belonged to one of them only, namely, the Glyptodon.

The _Schistopleuron_ does not differ essentially from the Glyptodon, but is supposed to have been a different species of the same genus; the chief difference between the two animals being in the structure of the tail, which is ma.s.sive in the first and in the other composed of half a score of rings. In other respects the organisation and habits are similar, both being herbivorous, and feeding on roots and vegetables.

Fig. 185 represents the _Schistopleuron typus_ restored, and as it appeared when alive.

Some of the fossil Tortoises discovered in the sub-Himalayan beds possessed a carapace twelve feet long by six feet in breadth, which must have corresponded to an animal from eighteen to twenty feet in length; and the bones of the legs were as ma.s.sive as those of the Rhinoceros.

The _Megatherium_, or Animal of Paraguay, as it was called, is, at first view, the oddest and most remarkable animal we have yet had under consideration, where all have been, according to our notions, strange, extraordinary, and formidable. The animal creation still goes on as if--

"Nature made them and then broke the die."