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Be this as it may, the mingled cries, roars, and shrieks, of sapajous, alouates, jaguars, cougars, pacaris, sloths, curassows, parraquas, etcetera, broke forth from time to time with such fury, that sleep was almost unattainable; then a thunderstorm came on which wet them to the skin; after that a large vampire-bat bit Bunco on the nose, causing that worthy to add his noise to the general concert; and, finally, a soft hairy animal dropt from a branch into Larry O'Hale's hammock.
Samuel tried to remember all that his uncle and cousins told him, and often thought of it when he was by himself. It would be well if you would do the same. Have you a little brother, or sister? See if you can tell it what Mr. Harvey told Samuel about bats, locusts, rivers, the rain, and sloths. You may also tell the story of Alice Gray, and old Jack the Soldier.
The attention of the visitor will, however, be soon riveted upon an animal which, with the beak of a duck and the claws of a bird, has the body of an otter. Before leaving these cases, the visitor should pause to notice the Sloths, and particularly the repulsive aspect of the yellow-faced sloth of South America. The visitor should now pass to the cases marked from 17 to 30.
We might therefore, by parity of reasoning, have anticipated that the creative power, adapting the new types to the new combination of organic and inorganic conditions of a given region, such as its soil, climate, and inhabitants, would introduce new modifications of the old types marsupials, for example, in Australia, new sloths and armadilloes in South America, new heaths at the Cape, new roses in the northern and new calceolarias in the southern hemisphere.
The allied group of the Sloths, which are still more exclusively South American forms than ant-eaters are, at the present time furnish arboreal species only, but formerly terrestrial forms of sloths also existed, as the Megatherium, whose mode of life was a puzzle, seeing that it was of too colossal a size to live on trees, until Owen showed how it might have obtained its food from the ground.
Very skilful accommodation was needful, if the limitation of sloths to South America, and of the ornithorhynchus to Australia, was to be reconciled with the literal interpretation of the history of the deluge; and with the establishment of the existence of distinct provinces of distribution, any serious belief in the peopling of the world by migration from Mount Ararat came to an end.
So when he got into the tropic forests of America, he took to the trees, and lived among the branches, feeding on sloths and monkeys, and never coming to the ground for weeks, till he grew fatter and stronger and far more terrible than his forefathers.
Before man the great and prevalent creatures followed one another processionally to extinction; the early monsters of the ancient seas, the clumsy amphibians struggling breathless to the land, the reptiles, the theriomorpha and the dinosaurs, the bat-winged reptiles of the Mesozoic forests, the colossal grotesque first mammals, the giant sloths, the mastodons and mammoths; it is as if some idle dreamer moulded them and broke them and cast them aside, until at last comes man and seizes the creative wrist that would wipe him out of being again.
It may be mentioned that they are subdivided into a number of genera, as the sloths, etcetera; and here, again, without any very sufficient reason, since they all possess the scaly armour from which the name armadillo is derived and their habits are nearly identical.
A little farther on, a couple of sloths were making their progress through the woods. I watched them passing from one tree to the other, as the branches met, stirred by the breeze; and having hitherto seen them hanging lazily by their claws to boughs, I was surprised at the rapidity of their movements.
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