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Updated: June 23, 2025
All day long it remains sleepily hanging under a bough, and only wakes up when night falls. It lives only on trees and eats leaves. In far-back ages there were sloths as large as rhinoceroses and elephants. We have, too, the raccoon in a greyish-yellow coat, also a nocturnal animal, which sleeps during the day in a hollow tree.
On most of them the foliage was thick; among the exceptions were the cecropias, growing by preference on new-formed alluvial soil bare of other trees, whose rather scanty leaf bunches were, as I was informed, the favorite food of sloths. We saw one or two squirrels among the trees, and a family of monkeys. There were few sand-banks in the river, and no water-fowl save an occasional cormorant.
But indeed there are ways I think I would always be nice, however rich I was ways that don't affect me very much, so that they're no sacrifice. And he's seen lots of things. Sloths, which I always thought were just metaphors. And ant-eaters, and alligators, and jaguars. And " "If you go to London," said Mr. Mactavish James, "you'll be losing your heart to a keeper at the Zoo."
In interglacial times of milder climate the arctic fauna-flora retreated, and their places were taken by plants and animals from the south. Peccaries, now found in Texas, ranged into Michigan and New York, while great sloths from South America reached the middle states.
The most comprehensive collection illustrating the descent of the horse is to be seen at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, where also the evolution of tapirs, camels, llamas, rhinoceroses, dinosaurs, great ground sloths and other animals are clearly to be traced in most cases by remains discovered in America.
In Hylobates syndactylus, as the name expresses, two of the toes regularly cohere; and this, as Mr. Blyth informs me, is occasionally the case with the toes of H. agilis, lar, and leuciscus. It deserves notice that the feet of the sloths, the most arboreal animals in the world, are wonderfully hook- like.
At any rate it is not for those who possess the intelligence to despair of obedience, until they have done their part. Some, no doubt, like the bucking horse that will never be broken in, will always refuse to submit to any guidance but their own lawless will. They will remain either the Ishmaels or the Sloths of Society. But man is naturally neither an Ishmael nor a Sloth.
If you turn to South America, where, at the present day, we have great sloths and armadilloes and creatures of that kind, what do you find in the newest tertiaries? You find the great sloth-like creature, the 'Megatherium', and the great armadillo, the 'Glyptodon', and so on.
He walked ahead gingerly, threw his hands aloft, bent forward, then suddenly protruded his stomach, held out one foot in front of him, spasmodically half turned, and then, realising the case hopeless, wilted like a wet rag, to clasp the pole trail both by arm and leg. This saved him from falling off altogether, but swung him underneath, where he hung like the sloths in the picture-books.
The teeth indicate, by their simple structure, that these Megatheroid animals lived on vegetable food, and probably on the leaves and small twigs of trees; their ponderous forms and great strong curved claws seem so little adapted for locomotion, that some eminent naturalists have actually believed, that, like the sloths, to which they are intimately related, they subsisted by climbing back downwards on trees, and feeding on the leaves.
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