When the prince of our "out-door naturalists" was wandering in the primæval forests of Demerara; when he watched the nimble sloth (strange antithesis!) wending its way along the forest boughs in full enjoyment of life and liberty; when he afterwards penned that beautiful history, in which the sloth is shown to be admirably constructed for its requirings, and in which the Almighty is redeemed from the wicked charge of having created a being for a life of unmitigated misery; when he was thus letting in a flood of light on Zoology from his truthful comments on the living, evidence was day by day accumulating of the former existence of creatures whose frames were constructed on the model of the sloth's, but whose ponderous bulk must have equalled that of the Hippopotamus, and whose Herculean strength must have thrown that of the elephant or even Mastodon into eclipse. What Waterton has done for the living, Owen has performed for the dead; and although we cannot give that unqualified assent to deductions from the admeasurement of bones which we cheerfully yield to the history of living nature, yet we regard Owen's masterly analysis as almost enforcing the views which he advocates with such consummate ability; indeed we cannot but infer from its pages that the sloths of to-day, are the pigmy representatives of a vast tribe of gigantic beings now utterly extinct.
In the 'Ossemens Fossiles'[1] the illustrious Cuvier has given us a detailed account of the structure of two of these extraordinary animals; and, notwithstanding their vast discrepancy in size, the scientific world at once adopted his view, that they belonged to the same natural order as the existing sloths. In 1838, the Society of Sciences at Copenhagen, printed a most able communication from Dr. Lund, entitled 'A View of the Fauna of Brazil previous to the last Geological Revolution;' and an excellent translation of this paper by the Rev. W. Bilton, appeared in several successive numbers of Mr. Charlesworth's 'Magazine of Natural History.' In the course of his observations, Dr. Lund enters very fully on the structure of these extinct giants, and adduces views respecting them which are replete with interest. How far the genera named by Dr. Lund are identical with those of Professor Owen, we are incompetent to decide; but we could have wished that a more direct communication had taken place between these authors; by this means all risk of a confused synonymy—the bane of science—might have been avoided: as it is fairness compels us to admit the great probability that several of the genera—there are
- ↑ Ossemens Fossiles, tome v. part i. p. 174.
