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Updated: July 29, 2025
We saw an animal resembling a deer on one hand, and a tapir on the other, as well as a kind of toed horse or hipparion, and a number of domestic pets all strange to us. The people, according to their tradition, came originally from a temperate land far across the ocean to the south-east, which is now a dark and frozen desert.
"In the circle of canoes that surrounded the island, there was perfect silence; each had a spot to guard, and each hunter sat, with arms ready, and eyes keenly fixed on the foliage of the underwood opposite his station. "The uba of the chief had remained to watch the path where the tracks of the tapir had been observed.
Once they started a giant tapir taking his afternoon snooze. The beast lazily got up and made off, but not before he had turned his piercing eyes on the intruders, as though wondering what new animals they were. Surely this was his first sight of the "lords of creation," and probably his last, for a bullet quickly whizzed after him.
There was the tapir, a great pig with a long nose, a variety of the hiptostamass, which the keeper said was an amphibilious animal, as couldn't live on land, and dies in the water however, it seemed to live very well in a cage. Then there was the kangaroo with its young ones peeping out of it a most astonishing animal.
Soon as forming his devilish resolve, the assassin gives his horse a prick of the spur, and passes on towards the sumac grove, entering at the same place as before, like a tiger skulking back to the quarry it has killed, and been chased away from. Once inside the thicket, he proceeds along the tapir path, groping his way in the darkness.
When attacked by either men or fierce animals, it tries to escape by flight, and if that fails, submits to be killed; but there is no "fight" to be got out of a tapir. The tapir leads a very solitary life, being met with alone, or sometimes in the company of the female.
You have, no doubt, seen a donkey sometimes gallop in a similar style. Guapo bounded after, followed by Leon, who kept close at his heels. Of course the tapir was in sight only a few seconds, but the hunter knew that he would take the beaten track, and therefore was at no loss. They made no unnecessary noise lest the tapir might be frightened from its path but ran on in silence.
Mastodons of several species are found in Pliocene strata in Europe and Asia; detached teeth are found in Suffolk. The Mastodons had a longer jaw and face than the elephants, though closely allied to them. So here, too, we are approaching the ordinary mammals, of which we may keep the pig and the tapir in mind as samples. But the Mastodons still had the great trunk and huge tusks of the elephants.
It was a tapir, then, which they had heard taking his regular nightly bath, and regaling himself on the roots of the flags and nymphæ. Have you ever seen a tapir? Not a living one, I fancy; perhaps the skin of one in a museum. He is an interesting creature, for this reason that he is the largest land animal indigenous to South America.
It is just possible, by the theory, that one of two living forms might have descended from the other; for instance, a horse from a tapir; and in this case DIRECT intermediate links will have existed between them.
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