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Updated: September 15, 2025
It includes several species, differing entirely from one another on the subject of nutrition, and closely resembling some already described. Some are both carnivorous and insectivorous, and are therefore armed with powerful canines, and with molars like those of the hedgehog. Others are herbivorous, like hares, and have almost the jaws of a rodent.
These herbivorous fresh-water animals live by drinking in the light, feeling the necessity of the surface waters or the shallow depths with their limpid glades and this light, spreading over the white interior of their dwelling, decorates it with all the fleeting colors of the iris, giving to the limestone the mysterious shimmer of mother-of-pearl.
Cuvier, for example, has been justly criticised for having formed his natural groups, with an undue degree of reference to the mode of alimentation, a circumstance directly connected only with organic life, and not leading to the arrangement most appropriate for the purposes of an investigation of the laws of animal life, since both carnivorous and herbivorous or frugivorous animals are found at almost every degree in the scale of animal perfection.
Moreover, the juice of the squirting cucumber is bitter and nauseous, and if it gets into the eyes or nostrils of man or beast, it impresses itself on the memory by stinging like red pepper. So the trick of squirting serves in a double way as a protection to the plant against the attacks of herbivorous animals and other enemies. But that's not all.
Really, by-the-by, I cannot give you a better instance of what I mean, than in my little diatribe on the Geryon Trifurcifer, a small reptile which I found, some years ago, inhabiting the mud of the salt lakes of Balkhan, which fills up a long-desired link between the Chelonia and the Perenni branchiate Batrachians, and, as I think, though Professor Brown differs from me, connects both with the Herbivorous Cetacea, Professor Brown is an exceedingly talented man, but a little too cautious in accepting any one's theories but his own.
The addition of a small quantity of a food, rich in oil and albuminous substances, to the ordinary kinds of feed, which contain a large quantity of vegetable fibre or woody matter, more or less indigestible, but, nevertheless, indispensable to the herbivorous animals, their digestive organs being adapted to a bulky food, has been found highly advantageous in practice.
Through all chances and changes it remained a garden up to 1621, when much of the original ground had been swallowed up by royal grants, and one duke and another had built his town-house amid the spreading trees; for this "amorous and herbivorous parish," as Sidney Smith calls it, was one of the most fashionable quarters of London.
But if the principles of those vegetables, which serve as food, could be generated without the co-operation of the mineral elements of blood, without potash, soda, phosphate of soda, phosphate of lime, they would be useless to us and to herbivorous animals as food; they would not fulfil the purpose for which the wisdom of the Creator has destined them.
We observe, for example, in the Triassic, Oolitic, and Cretaceous strata, not only an absence of placental mammalia, but the presence of innumerable reptiles, some of large size, terrestrial and aquatic, herbivorous and predaceous, fitted to perform the functions now discharged by the mammalia.
Different degrees of density may throw light on the different behavior of gases and fluids and solids, but can it throw any light on the question of why a horse is a horse, and a dog a dog? or why one is an herbivorous feeder, and the other a carnivorous?
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