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Among the fresh-water strata of this age near the base of the Pyrenees are marls, limestones and sands, in which the eminent comparative anatomist, M. Lartet, has obtained a great number of fossil mammalia common to the faluns of the Loire and the Upper Miocene beds of Switzerland, such as Dinotherium giganteum and Mastodon angustidens; also the bones of quadrumana, or of the ape and monkey tribe, which were discovered in 1837, the first of that order of quadrupeds detected in Europe.
They indicate a savage life, spent in hunting and fishing. Recent researches give reason to believe that, under low and base grades, the existence of man can be traced back into the tertiary times. He was contemporary with the southern elephant, the rhinoceros leptorhinus, the great hippopotamus, perhaps even in the miocene contemporary with the mastodon.
Among these huge Tertiary Mammalia, one of those most common on the North-American continent seems to have been the Mastodon. The magnificent specimens preserved in this country are too well known to require description. The remains of the Rhinoceros occur also in the recent Tertiary deposits of North America, though as yet no perfect skeletons have been found.
There are all the marvels and portents of the Eyrbyggja Saga to draw upon, there are Skraelings to fight, and why should not Karlsefni's son kill the last mastodon, and, as Quetzalcoatl, be the white-bearded god of the Aztecs? After that a romance on the intrigues to make Charles Edward King of Poland sounds commonplace. But much might be made of that, too, if the right man took it in hand.
One soon becomes acquainted with new species of pine and fir and spruce as with friendly people, shaking their outstretched branches like shaking hands and fondling their little ones, while the venerable aboriginal sequoia, ancient of other days, keeps you at a distance, looking as strange in aspect and behavior among its neighbor trees as would the mastodon among the homely bears and deers.
I should personally be inclined to think that we have indications that carnivora, ungulates, and birds are final forms; that no evolution will ever modify a bird further into anything that is not a bird; that no transition between the ungulates and the carnivora is possible; that the proboscideae are not a final but a transitory type, dying out gradually our elephants and similar forms will disappear as the mastodon did.
I am sure that I read, some 20 to 30 years ago, in a French journal, an account of teeth of mastodon found in Timor; but the statement may have been an error. With respect to what you say about the colonising of New Zealand, I somewhere have an account of a frog frozen in the ice of a Swiss glacier, and which revived when thawed.
It is said to contain 60,000 inhabitants. Monte Video, the second town of importance on the banks of the Plata, has 15,000. Excursion to St. Fe Thistle Beds Habits of the Bizcacha Little Owl Saline Streams Level Plain Mastodon St.
The whole party crowded to the spot where Uncas pointed out the impression of a moccasin in the moist alluvion. "This lad will be an honor to his people," said Hawkeye, regarding the trail with as much admiration as a naturalist would expend on the tusk of a mammoth or the rib of a mastodon; "ay, and a thorn in the sides of the Hurons.
"I had come up from the lower hills all one day," said the Mastodon. "There was a feel in the air as if the Great Cold had breathed into it. It curdled blue as pond water, and under the blueness the forest color showed like weed under water. I walked by myself and did not care who heard me.
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