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. An
examination, moreover, of the geology of La Plata and Patagonia, leads
to the belief that all the features of the land result from slow and
gradual changes. It appears from the character of the fossils in
Europe, Asia, Australia, and in North and South America, that those
conditions which favour the life of the _larger_ quadrupeds were lately
co-extensive with the world: what those conditions were, no one has yet
even conjectured. It could hardly have been a change of temperature,
which at about the same time destroyed the inhabitants of tropical,
temperate, and arctic latitudes on both sides of the globe. In North
America we positively know from Mr. Lyell, that the large quadrupeds
lived subsequently to that period, when boulders were brought into
latitudes at which icebergs now never arrive: from conclusive but
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