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The lowest plain was estimated at ninety feet: it is remarkable from the usual gravel-bed being deeply worn into hollows, which are filled up with, as well as the general surface covered by, sandy and reddish earthy matter: in one of the hollows thus filled up, the skeleton of the Macrauchenia Patachonica, as will hereafter be described, was embedded.
We may doubt whether they have thus changed: if the Megatherium, Mylodon, Macrauchenia, and Toxodon had been brought to Europe from La Plata, without any information in regard to their geological position, no one would have suspected that they had co-existed with still living sea-shells; but as these anomalous monsters co-existed with the Mastodon and Horse, it might at least have been inferred that they had lived during one of the later tertiary stages.
The antiquity of the Indo-human race here, judging by the eighty-five feet rise of the land since the relics were embedded, is the more remarkable, as on the coast of Patagonia, when the land stood about the same number of feet lower, the Macrauchenia was a living beast; but as the Patagonian coast is some way distant from the Cordillera, the rising there may have been slower than here.
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. Nevertheless, if we consider the subject under another point of view, it will appear less perplexing.
The antiquity of the Indo-human race here, judging by the eighty-five feet rise of the land since the relics were embedded, is the more remarkable, as on the coast of Patagonia, when the land stood about the same number of feet lower, the Macrauchenia was a living beast; but as the Patagonian coast is some way distant from the Cordillera, the rising there may have been slower than here.
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. Nevertheless, if we consider the subject under another point of view, it will appear less perplexing.
I was at first much surprised how a large quadruped could so lately have subsisted, in latitude 49 degrees 15', on these wretched gravel plains with their stunted vegetation; but the relationship of the Macrauchenia to the Guanaco, now an inhabitant of the most sterile parts, partly explains this difficulty.
The huanaco is a small camel small, that is, compared with its existing relation without a hump, and, unlike the camel of the Old World, non-specializad; doubtless it is a very ancient animal on the earth, and for all we know to the contrary, may have existed contemporaneously with some of the earliest known representatives of the camel type, whose remains occur in the lower and upper miocene deposits Poebrotherium, Protolabis, Procamelus, Pliauchenia, and Macrauchenia.
Mr. In ascending to this level, several step-formed plains must be crossed, all of which have necessarily required long time for their formation; hence the lowest or ninety feet plain, with its superficial bed containing the remains of the Macrauchenia, must have been formed very long subsequently to the period when the 1,400 feet plain was beneath the sea, and boulders were dropped on it from floating masses of ice.
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.
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