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.
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