imagined without having been seen, become on this view, of obvious
service, instead of being an incumbrance: their apparent clumsiness
disappears. With their great tails and their huge heels firmly fixed
like a tripod on the ground, they could freely exert the full force of
their most powerful arms and great claws. Strongly rooted, indeed,
must that tree have been, which could have resisted such force! The
Mylodon, moreover, was furnished with a long extensile tongue like that
of the giraffe, which, by one of those beautiful provisions of nature,
thus reaches with the aid of its long neck its leafy food. I may
remark, that in Abyssinia the elephant, according to Bruce, when it
cannot reach with its proboscis the branches, deeply scores with its
tusks the trunk of the tree, up and down and all round, till it is
sufficiently weakened to be broken down.
The beds including the above fossil remains, stand only from fifteen to
twenty feet above the level of high-water; and hence the elevation of
the land has been small (without there has been an intercalated period
of subsidence, of which we have no evidence) since the great quadrupeds
wandered over the surrounding plains; and the external features of the
country must then have been very nearly the same as now. What, it may
naturally be asked, was the character of the vegetation at that period;
was the country as wretchedly sterile as it now is? As so many of the
co-embedded shells are the same with those now living in the bay, I was
at first inclined to think that the former vegetation was probably
similar to the existing one; but this would have been an erroneous
inference for some of these same shells live on the luxuriant coast of
Brazil; and generally, the character of the inhabitants of the sea are
useless as guides to judge of those on the land. Nevertheless, from
the following considerations, I do not believe that the simple fact of
many gigantic quadrupeds having lived on the plains round Bahia Blanca,
is any sure guide that they formerly were clothed with a luxuriant
vegetation: I have no doubt that the sterile country a little
southward, near the Rio Negro, with its scattered thorny trees, would
support many and large quadrupeds.
That large animals require a luxuriant vegetation, has been a general
assumption which has passed from one work to another; but I do not
hesitate to say that it is completely false, and that it has vitiated
the reasoning of geologists on some points of great interest in the
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