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 indirect reasons we may feel sure, that in the
southern hemisphere the Macrauchenia, also, lived long subsequently
to the ice-transporting boulder-period. Did man, after his first
inroad into South America, destroy, as has been suggested, the
unwieldy Megatherium and the other Edentata? We must at least look
to some other cause for the destruction of the little tucutuco at
Bahia Blanca, and of the many fossil mice and other small
quadrupeds in Brazil. No one will imagine that a drought, even far
severer than those which cause such losses in the provinces of La
Plata, could destroy every individual of every species from
Southern Patagonia to Behring's Straits. What shall we say of the
extinction of the horse? Did those plains fail of pasture, which
have since been overrun by thousands and hundreds of thousands of
the descendants of the stock introduced by the Spaniards? Have the
subsequently introduced species consumed the food of the great
antecedent races? Can we believe that the Capybara has taken the
food of the Toxodon, the Guanaco of the Macrauchenia, the existing
small Edentata of their numerous gigantic prototypes? Certainly, no
fact in the long history of the world is so startling as the wide
and repeated exterminations of its inhabitants.
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