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Updated: June 14, 2025
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 sea-shells all still living; 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.
If we had found a wriggle, or a zigzag, or a shoot from one side to the other, in this last flask, what a scare there would have been, to be sure, in the schools of the prophets! Talk about your megatherium and your megalosaurus, what are these to the bacterium and the vibrio? These are the dreadful monsters of today.
His countenance presents the extraordinary appearance of an antediluvian man, a true contemporary of the Megatherium. Still the mast holds good against the storm. The sail spreads out and fills like a soap bubble about to burst.
The enormous skeletons of the glyptodons struck him also as strangely similar to that of the armadillo. One evening, seated alone in the broad expanse of the pampas, the idea suddenly swept over him, stimulated, of course, by his study of Lyell: "Can it be that the little armadillo and the sloth of to-day are the degenerate descendants of the enormous megatherium and glyptodon of the past?"
London is evidenced in every one of them, just as a megatherium is in each of its separate bones, even if they be small ones.
Lyell, namely, that the "longevity of the species in the mammalia is upon the whole inferior to that of the testacea." The great size of the bones of the Megatheroid animals, including the Megatherium, Megalonyx, Scelidotherium, and Mylodon, is truly wonderful.
"I suppose you've come here so early to ask for something for yourself something your brothers and sisters aren't to know about, eh? Now, do be persuaded for your own good! Ask for a good fat Megatherium and have done with it." "Thank you not to-day, I think," said Cyril cautiously. "What I really wanted to say was you know how you're always wishing for things when you're playing at anything?"
Priesthood works out its task, age after age: now smoothing penitent death-beds, consecrating graves! feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, incarnating the Christian precepts, in an age of rapine and homicide, doing a thousand deeds of love and charity among the obscure and forsaken deeds of which there shall never be human chronicle, but a leaf or two, perhaps, in the recording angel's book; hiving precious honey from the few flowers of gentle, art which bloom upon a howling wilderness; holding up the light of science over a stormy sea; treasuring in convents and crypts the few fossils of antique learning which become visible, as the extinct Megatherium of an elder world reappears after the gothic deluge; and now, careering in helm and hauberk with the other ruffians, bandying blows in the thickest of the fight, blasting with bell, book, and candle its trembling enemies, while sovereigns, at the head of armies, grovel in the dust and offer abject submission for the kiss of peace; exercising the same conjury over ignorant baron and cowardly hind, making the fiction of apostolic authority to bind and loose, as prolific in acres as the other divine right to have and hold; thus the force of cultivated intellect, wielded by a chosen few and sanctioned by supernatural authority, becomes as potent as the sword.
His eyeballs hang out upon his cheeks, the veins rise on his neck, and the lumpy cords and muscles stand out on his arms and hands. Boohoop, boohoop! yes, six times boohoop does that brazen megatherium blare out, vivid and distinct, above all the other sixty instruments in the orchestra.
When these revolutions became less frequent, and the globe became still more cooled, and the inequalities of its temperature preserved by the mountain chains, more perfect animals became its inhabitants, many of which, such as the mammoth, megalonix, megatherium, and gigantic hyena, are now extinct.
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