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Updated: June 23, 2025
When we consider, further, that almost all other animals have in earlier ages been represented by allied yet distinct forms that, in the latter part of the tertiary period, Europe was inhabited by bears, deer, wolves, and cats; Australia by kangaroos and other marsupials; South America by gigantic sloths and ant-eaters; all different from any now existing, though intimately allied to them we have every reason to believe that the Orangutan, the Chimpanzee, and the Gorilla have also had their forerunners.
Squeaks and grunts constitute the vocabulary, if we dignify it by that name, of the mammals. The sloths, those curious animals whose entire life is spent clinging to the underside of branches, on whose leaves they feed, may be said almost to be voiceless, so seldom do they give utterance to the nameless wail which constitutes their only utterance.
Great gaps would be made in the ranks of the furry creatures the mammals. Opossums and raccoons would find themselves in an embarrassing position, and as for the sloths, which never descend to earth, depending for protection on their resemblance to leaves and mossy bark, they would be wiped out with one fell swoop.
The sloths are all inhabitants of tropical America dwellers in the great forests of Guiana and Brazil. As natural curiosities in the animal kingdom, the Armadilloes do not yield to any of the four-footed creatures, and an account of their habits, would space permit, could not be otherwise than extremely interesting.
A voyage to South America must have been made to obtain tapirs, pumas, peccaries, sloths, ant-eaters, armadillos, fourteen each of the llama, alpaca, and vicuna, beside monkeys, birds, and insects innumerable. A vessel nearly as large as "The Great Eastern" must have been employed, or a number of smaller ones, to accommodate the collectors, the animals, and food for a voyage across the Atlantic.
It was a splendid population for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths staid at home you never find that sort of people among pioneers you cannot build pioneers out of that sort of material.
Its fauna is now marked, for instance, by the presence of medium-sized deer and cats, fox-like wolves, and small camel-like creatures, as well as by the presence of small armadillos, sloths, and ant-eaters.
For its sins, we need not doubt; for its own long-continued cowardices, sloths and greedy follies, as well as those of Kaiser Karl! At this Fourth change we will gladly leave the matter, for a time; much wishing it might be forever. Alas, as if that were possible to us! No Alberoni-plotting; no Duel-fighting permitted!" War imminent. Prussia privately falls off, as we shall see.
In like manner, among the mammalia we find in Australia not only living kangaroos and wombats, but fossil individuals of extinct species of the same genera. So also there are recent and fossil sloths, armadilloes and other Edentata in South America, and living and extinct species of elephant, rhinoceros, tiger, and bear in the great Europeo-Asiatic continent.
I interrupted, with the frankness of speech you know I always use; "I execrate academies; they are stiflers, extinguishers, assemblages of sloths, idlers, shops with big signs and nothing to sell inside "
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