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As the animal increased in size it became more clumsy, its limbs became shorter and more massive, and, perhaps because of its great weight, the number of digits were not reduced below the number three. Like other large herbivores, the rhinoceros, too slow to escape its enemies by flight, learned to withstand them. It developed as its means of defense a nasal horn.
Then, to repel the attacks of herbivores, who would gladly get at the juicy morsel if they could, the foliage has been turned into sharp defensive spines and prickles.
Here, in fact, "cooking" makes all the difference, just as it does in the matter we were discussing above of the fitness of flesh and bone for trituration by man's teeth. The teeth are placed closely side by side without a gap an arrangement which does not occur in the apes nor in any other living mammal, although it is found in some extinct herbivores the Anoplotherium and the Arsinöitherium.
Both birds took considerable doses, and, after a period of insensibility extending to several hours, woke up in the end quite bright and lively. "I see your principle," the Professor broke out. "It depends upon diet. Carnivores and birds of prey can take lethodyne with impunity; herbivores and fruit-eaters cannot recover, and die of it.
The starving herbivores that find themselves from time to time belated on the confines of such thirsty regions would seize with avidity upon any succulent plant which offered them food and drink at once in their last extremity. Fancy the joy with which a lost caravan, dying of hunger and thirst in the byways of Sahara, would hail a great bed of melons, cucumbers, and lettuces!
Herbivores meeting with new beasts of prey, would, in some cases, be led into modes of defence or escape differing from those previously used; and simultaneously the beasts of prey would modify their modes of pursuit and attack.
Meadows or prairies occur nowhere in nature, except in places where the liability to destructive fires over wide areas together crushes out forest trees, or else where goats, bison, deer, and other large herbivores browse them ceaselessly down in the stage of seedlings. Competition for sunlight is thus even keener perhaps than competition for foodstuffs.
Large numbers of wapiti deer, of the smaller Virginian deer, and of the prongbuck "antelope" thronged the grassy flats, and elk browsed on the foliage of the thickets along the river banks. Grizzly bears and black bears, large grey wolves, the small coyote wolf, the pretty little kit fox and large red fox preyed on these herbivores, as did also pumas and lynxes.
We saw that the primitive herbivores divided early in the Eocene into the "odd-toed" and "even-toed" varieties; the name refers, it will be remembered, not to the number of toes, but to the axis of stress. The Artiodactyl group must have quickly branched in turn, as we find very primitive hogs and camels before the end of the Eocene.
"Learned doctor, your addingmachine gives you the answer: so many carnivores, so many herbivores, the parallel dashes introduce extinction. Confusedly the savor of Abel's sacrifice was sweet to His nostrils, not Cain's fruits. So is the mind confounded.
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