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Updated: May 14, 2025
He strode straight to the chief place, under the rent, dishevelled tree, and fell to tearing at the mountainous corpse of the megatherium. He was undisturbed till two saber-tooths arrived, their tawny coats spectral in the moonlight, their foot-long tusks giving their broad masks a dreadful grin.
Casinos were not invented: clubs were rather rare luxuries: there were sanded floors, triangular sawdust-boxes, pipes, and tavern parlours. Young Smith and Brown, from the Temple, did not go from chambers to dine at the Polyanthus, or the Megatherium, off potage a la Bisque, turbot au gratin, cotelettes a la What-do-you-call-'em, and a pint of St.
All these atrocities and follies amuse and interest us now; they are the coprolites of a literary megatherium, once hateful to gods and men, now inoffensive and curious fossilized specimens. In 1863, a Scotchman, whom Dr. Johnson would have hated for his birth, and have knocked down with his Dictionary for his assaults upon the English language, has usurped the chair of the sturdy old dogmatist.
Hochstetter and other travelers on the present existence of the wingless giants of New Zealand. These moas which Paganel was chasing, the contemporaries of the Megatherium and the Pterodactyles, must have been eighteen feet high. They were huge ostriches, timid too, for they fled with extreme rapidity. But no shot could stay their course.
Who would feel any great surprise at hearing that the Magalonyx was formerly rare compared with the Megatherium, or that one of the fossil monkeys was few in number compared with one of the now living monkeys? and yet in this comparative rarity, we should have the plainest evidence of less favourable conditions for their existence.
But since the building of the new quarter, such a diet has become a luxury; cows and goats will soon be scarce as the megatherium. There is a tax of a franc a day on every cow, and a herd of ten goats, barely enough to keep a poor man alive, must pay annually 380 francs in octroi.
We think, when we pronounce the word, of the prehistoric monsters: the mastodon, the mammoth, the ponderous megatherium. Well, we are misled by the scientific label: we have to do with a very paltry insect, smaller than the common gnat.
All the more did the affairs of the great world interest her, when communicated in the letters of high-born relations: the way in which fascinating younger sons had gone to the dogs by marrying their mistresses; the fine old-blooded idiocy of young Lord Tapir, and the furious gouty humors of old Lord Megatherium; the exact crossing of genealogies which had brought a coronet into a new branch and widened the relations of scandal, these were topics of which she retained details with the utmost accuracy, and reproduced them in an excellent pickle of epigrams, which she herself enjoyed the more because she believed as unquestionably in birth and no-birth as she did in game and vermin.
The monster looked around for more victims and was just in time to see the hideous vision of the rhinoceros charging down upon her. Triumphant from the encounter with the lions, he rushed back to slake his still unsatisfied fury on the pig-tapirs. At any other time he would have given such an antagonist as the colossal megatherium a wide berth; but just now he was in one of his madnesses.
They think of it all as immediate and contemporaneous, a vast panorama of innumerable ages being all crammed for them on to a single mental sheet, in which the dodo and the moa hob-an'-nob amicably with the pterodactyl and the ammonite; in which the tertiary megatherium goes cheek by jowl with the secondary deinosaurs and the primary trilobites; in which the huge herbivores of the Paris Basin are supposed to have browsed beneath the gigantic club-mosses of the Carboniferous period, and to have been successfully hunted by the great marine lizards and flying dragons of the Jurassic Epoch.
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