the former, as it is not above seven inches from the tip of the snout to the insertion of the tail. The two former are of a brown, dusky colour, but this of a beautiful reddish, mixed with yellow; though they differ in figure, they all resemble each other in one peculiarity, which is the extreme slenderness of their snout, and the amazing length of their tongue.* The snout is produced in so disproportionate a manner, that the length of it makes near a fourth part of the whole figure. A horse has one of the longest heads of any animal we know, and yet the ant-bear has one above twice as long in proportion to its body. The snout of this animal is almost round and cylindrical; it is extremely slender, and is scarce thicker near the eyes than at its extremity. The mouth is very small, the nostrils are very close to each other, the eyes are little in proportion to the length of the nose, the neck is short, the tongue is extremely long, slender, and flatted on both sides; this it keeps generally doubled up in the mouth, and is the only instrument by which it finds subsistence; for the whole of this tribe are entirely without teeth, and find safety only in the remoteness and security of their retreat. If we examine through the various regions of the earth, we shall find that all the most active, sprightly, and useful quadrupeds have been gathered round man, and either served his pleasures, or still maintained their independence by their vigilance, their cunning, or their industry. It is in the remote solitudes that we are to look for the helpless, the deformed, and the monstrous births of Nature. These wretched animals, being incapable of defending themselves either by their agility or their natural arms, fall a prey to every creature that attacks them; they, therefore, retire for safety into the darkest forests, or the most desert mountains, where none of the bolder or swifter animals choose to reside. It may well be supposed that an animal so helpless as the ant-bear is, with legs too short to fit it for flight, and unprovided with teeth to give it power of resistance, is neither numerous nor often seen its retreats are in the most barren and uncultivated parts of South America. It is a native only of the new continent, and entirely unknown to the old. It lives chiefly in the woods, and hides itself under the fallen leaves. It seldom ventures from its retreat; and the industry of an hour supplies it with sufficient food for several days together. Its manner of procuring its prey is one of the most singular in all natural history. As its name implies, it lives entirely upon ants and insects; these, in the countries where it is bred, are found in the greatest abundance, and often build themselves hills, five or six feet high, where they live in community. When this animal approaches an ant-hill, it creeps slowly forward on its belly, taking every precaution to keep itself concealed, till it comes within a proper distance of the place where it intends to make its banquet; there lying closely along at its length, it thrusts forth its round, red tongue, which is often two feet long, across the path of these busy insects, and there lets it lie motionless for several ANT-BEAR.-On November 22, 1831, a letter from Sir R. Ker Porter, Corr. Memb. Zoological Society, dated City of Caracas, Sept. 10, 1831, was read. It contained a detailed description of the Myrmecophaga jubata, Linn., under the name of Orso Hormeguero, or ant-bear, together with an account of the habits of that animal; and was accompanied by a drawing of the fully grown individual from whom the description was taken. Sir R. Ker Porter was particularly struck with the difference in structure which exists be tween the fore and the hinder feet, and with the curious disposition of the parts of the former in the act of progression, which has been slightly referred to by D Azara. In the figure (in which the animal is represented in a standing position) the claws of the fore feet He minutes together. The ants of that country, some of which are half an inch long, considering it as a piece of flesh accidentally thrown before them, come forth and swarm upon it in great numbers; but wherever they touch, they stick: for this instrument is covered with a slimy fluid, which, like bird-lime, entangles every creature that lights upon it. When, therefore, the ant-bear has found a sufficient number for one morsel, it instantly draws in the tongue, and devours them all in a moment; after which it still continues in its position, practising the same arts until its hunger is entirely appeased; it then retires to its hiding-place once more, where it continues in indolent existence till again excited by the calls of hunger. Such is the luxurious life of a creature that seems of all others the most helpless and deformed. It finds safety in its hiding-place from its enemies, and an ample supply in some neighbouring ant-hill, for all its appetites. As it only tries to avoid its pursuers, it is seldom discovered by them; yet, helpless as this animal is, when driven to an extremity, though without teeth, it will fight with its claws with great obstinacy. With these arms alone, it has often been found to oppose the dog, and even the jaguar. It throws itself upon its back, fastens upon its enemy with all its claws, sticks with great strength and perseverance, and even after killing its invader, which is sometimes the case, does not quit its hold, but remains fastened upon him in vindictive desperation.* CHAP. XXXV. THE SLOTH.† Or the Sloth there are two different kinds, distinguished from each other by their claws; the one, which in its native country is called the Unan, having only two claws upon each foot, and being without a tail: the other, which is called the Ai, having a tail, and three claws upon each foot. The unan has the snout longer, the ears more apparent, and the fur very different from the other. It differs also in the number of its ribs; this having forty-six, while the ai has but twenty-eight. These differences, however, which though very apparent, have been *THE ANT-EATERS.-Besides the animal here described, there are others of the same kind; the most remarkable of which are the Little Ant-eater of New Holland and the Prickly Ant-eater of New Holland. The former is singular for its having only two toes on the fore feet, armed with strong claws, and a tail which it is able to coil round the branches of trees and hold fast by. The whole animal is clothed in a beautiful, soft, curled, pale yellow fur. It is a native of Guinea. The prickly int-eater is a short (The Sloth) rounded animal, with a long, tubular mouth, and entirely covered over on the upper parts with strong sharp spines, resembling those of the porcupine. THE TARDIGRADE, OR SLOW-PACED FAMILY-Naturalists express their pity for the animals of the tardigrade or slow-footed family. Whilst other quadrupeds, they say, range in boundless wilds, the sloth hangs suspended by his strong arms-a poor illformed creature, deficient as well as deformed, but little regarded in the description of two animals which so strongly resemble each other in the general outlines of their figure, in their appetites, and their helpless formation. his hind legs too short, and his hair like withered grass; his looks, motions, and cries, conspire to excite pity; and, as if this were not enough, they say that his moaning makes the tiger relent and turn away. This is not a true picture: the sloth cannot walk like quadrupeds, but he stretches out his strong arms, and if he can hook on his claws to the inequalities of the ground, he drags himself along. This is the condition which authorizes such an expression as "the bungled and faulty composition of the sloth " But when he reaches the branch or the rough bark of a tree his progress is rapid; he climbs hand over head along the branches till they touch, and thus from bough to bough, and from tree to tree: he is most alive in the storm; and when the wind blows and the trees stoop and the branches wave and meet, he is then upon the march. The compassion expressed by these philosophers for animals which they consider imperfectly organized, is uncalled for; as well might they pity the larva of the summer fly which creeps in the bottom of a pool because it cannot yet rise upon the wing. As the insect has no impulse to fly until the metamorphosis is perfect and the wings developed, so we have no reason to suppose that a disposition or instinct is given to animals where there is no corresponding provision for motion. The sloth may move tardily on the ground, his long arms and his preposterous claws may be an incumbrance, but they are of advantage in his natural place among the branches of trees, in obtaining his food and in giving him shelter and safety from his enemies. We must not estimate the slow motions of animals by our own sensations. The motion of the bill of the swallow or the fly-catcher in catching a fly is so rapid that we do not see it, but only hear the snap. On the contrary, how very different are the means given to the chameleon for obtaining his food; he lies more still than the dead leaf, his skin is like the bark of the tree and takes the hue of surrounding objects. Whilst other animals have excitement conforming to their rapid motions, the shrivelled face of the chameleon hardly indicates life; the eyelids are scarcely parted; he protrudes his tongue with a motion so imperceptible towards the insect that it is touched and caught more certainly than by the most lively action. Thus, various creatures living upon insects reach their prey by different means and instincts; rapidity of motion which gives no time for escape is bestowed on some, while others have a languid and slow movement that excites no alarm. Buffon, speaking of the extinct species of the tardigrade family, considers them as monsters by defect of organization;—as attempts of nature in which she has failed to perfect her plan;-that she has produced animals which must have lived miserably, and which are effaced as failures from the list of living beings. The Baron Cuvier does not express himself more favourably when he says of the existing species that they have so little resem blance to the organization of animals generally, and their structure is so much in coutrast with that of other creatures, that he could believe them to be the remnants of an order unsuitable to the present system of nature; and if we are to look for their congeners it must be in the interior of the earth, in the ruins of the ancient world. The animals of the antediluvian world were not monsters; there was no lusus or extravagance. Hideous as they appear to us, and, like the phantoms of a dream, they were adapted to the condition of the earth when they existed. I could have wished that our naturalists had given the inhabitants of that early condition of the globe names less scholastic. We have the plesiosaurus and plesiosaurus dolichodeirus; we have the ichthyosaurus and megalosaurus, and iguanodon, pterodactyles, with long and short beaks, tortoises, and crocodiles; and these are found among reeds and grasses of gigantic proportions, algæ, and fuci, and a great variety of mollusca of inordinate bulk, compared with those of the present day, as ammonites and nautili. Every thing declares that these animals inhabited shallow seas and estuaries or great inland lakes; that the surface of the earth did not rise up in peaks and mountains, or that perpendicular rocks bound in the seas, but that it was flat, slimy, and covered with a loaded and foggy atmosphere. There is, indeed, every reason to believe that the classes mammalia and birds were not then created; and that if man had been placed in this condition of the earth there must have been around him a state of things unsuited to his constitution and not calculated to call forth his capacities. But, looking to the class of animals as we have enumerated them, there is a correspondence: they were scaly; they swam in water or crept upon the margins; there were no animals possessed of rapidity of motion, and no birds of prey to stoop upon them; there was, in short, that balance of the power of destruction and self-preservation which we see now to obtain in higher animals since created with infinitely varied instincts and powers for defence or attack.-SIR CHARLES BELL-BRIDGEWATER TREATISES. eye They are both, therefore, described under the common appellation of the sloth, and their habitudes well deserve our wonder and curiosity. Nature seems cramped and constrained in their formation; other animals are often indolent from choice, these are slow from necessity. The ai, from which I shall take my description, and from which the other differs only in the slight particulars above-mentioned, and in being rather more active, is of about the size of a badger. Its fur is coarse and staring, somewhat resembling dried grass; the tail very short and scarce appearing; the mouth extending from ear to ear; the dull and heavy; the feet armed with three claws each, and made so short, and set on so awkwardly, that a few paces is often the journey of a week; but though the feet are short, they are still longer than its legs, and these proceed from the body in such an oblique direction that the sole of the foot seldom touches the ground. When the animal, therefore, is compelled to make a step forward, it scrapes on the back of the nails along the surface, and wheeling the limbs circularly about, yet still touching the ground, it at length places its foot in a progressive position: the other three limbs are all brought about with the same difficulty; and thus it is seen to move not above three feet in an hour. In fact, this poor creature seldom changes place but by constraint, and when impelled by the severest stings of hunger. The sloth seems to be the meanest and most ill-formed of all those animals that chew the cud: it lives entirely upon vegetable food, on the leaves, the fruit, and the flowers of trees, and often even on the very bark, when nothing else is left on the tree for its subsistence. Like all other ruminant animals it has four stomachs; and these requiring a large share of provision to supply them, it generally strips a tree of all its verdure in less than a fortnight. Still, however, it keeps aloft, unwilling to descend while anything remains that can serve it for food; it, therefore, falls to devouring the bark, and thus in a short time kills the tree upon which it found its support. Thus destitute of provisions above, and crawling slowly from branch to branch in hopes of finding something still left, it is at last obliged to encounter all the dangers that attend it below. Though it is formed by nature for climbing a tree with great pain and difficulty, yet it is utterly unable to descend: it, therefore, is obliged to drop from the branches to the ground, and as it is incapable of exerting itself to break the violence of its descent, it drops like a shapeless, heavy mass, and feels no small shock in the fall. There, after remaining some time torpid, it prepares for a journey to some neighbouring tree; but this of all migrations is the most tedious, dangerous, and painful; it often takes a week in crawling to a tree not fifty yards distant; it moves with imperceptible slowness, and often baits by the way. All motions seem to torture it; every step it takes it sets forth a most plaintive, melancholy cry, which, from some distant similitude to the human voice, excites a kind of disgust mixed with pity. This plaintive sound seems its chief defence; few quadrupeds appear willing to interrupt its progress, either that the flesh is offensive or that they are terrified at its cries. When at length they reach their THE SLOTH.-This singular animal is destined by nature to be produced, to live, and to die in the trees; and to do justice to him, naturalists must examine him in this his upper element. He is a scarce and solitary animal, and, being good food, he is never allowed to escape. He inhabits remote and gloomy forests where snakes take up their abode, and where cruelly stinging ants, and scorpions, and swamps, and innumerable thorny shrubs and bushes, obstruct the steps of civilized man. Were you to draw your own conclusions from the descriptions which have been given of the sloth, you would probably suspect that no naturalist has actually gone into the wilds with the fixed deterinina tion to find him out and examine his haunts, and see whether nature has committed any blunder in the formation of this extraordinary animal, which appears to us so forlorn and miserable, so ill put together, and so totally unfit to enjoy the blessings which have been so bountifully given to the rest of animated nature; for, as it has formerly been remarked, he has no soles to his feet, and he is evidently ill at ease when he strives to move on the ground, and it is then that he looks up in your face with a countenance that seems to say "Have pity on me, for I am in pain and sorrow!"-WANDERINGS IN SOUTH AMERICA. destined tree, they mount it with much greater ease than when they moved upon the plain. They fall to with famished appetite, and, as before, destroy the very source that supplies them.* How far these may be considered as the unfinished productions of nature, 1 will not take upon me to determine: if we measure their happiness by our sensations, nothing, it is certain, can be more miserable; but it is probable, considered with regard to themselves, they may have some stores of comfort unknown to us, which may set them upon a level with some other inferior ranks of the creation; if a part of their life be exposed to pain and labour, it is compensated by a larger portion of plenty, indolence, and safety. In fact, they are formed very differently from all other quadrupeds, and it is probable they have different enjoyments. Like birds they have but one common vent for the purposes of propagation, excrement, and urine. Like the tortoise, which they resemble in the slowness of their motion, they continue to live some time after their nobler parts are wounded, or even taken away. They bear the marks of all those homely-formed animals that, like rude machines, are not easily discomposed. Its note,(g) according to Kircher, is an ascending and descending hexachord, which it utters only by night; its look is so piteous as to move compassion; it is also accompanied with tears, that dissuade everybody from injuring so wretched a being. Its abstinence from food is remarkably powerful: one that had fas tened itself by its feet to a pole, and was so suspended across two beams, remained forty days without meat, drink, or sleep; the strength of its feet is so great that whatsoever it seizes on cannot possibly be freed from its claws. A dog was let loose at the above-mentioned animal, taken from the pole; after some time the sloth laid hold of the dog with its feet, and held him four days, till he perished with hunger. HABITS OF THE SLOTH.-One day as we were crossing the Essequibo, I saw a large two-toed sloth on the ground upon the bank; how he had got there nobody could tell: the Indian said he had never surprised a sloth in such a situation before: he could hardly have come there to drink, for both above and below the place the branches of the trees touched the water, and afforded him an easy and safe access to it. Be this as it may, though the trees were not above twenty yards from him, he could not make his way through the sand time enough to escape before we landed. As soon as we got up to him, he threw himself upon his back, and defended himself in gal lant style with his fore legs. "Come, poor fellow," said I to him, " if thou hast got into a hobble to-day thou shalt not suffer for itI'll take no advantage of thee in misfortune." On saying this, I took up a long stick which was lying there, held it for him to hook on, and then conveyed him to a high and stately mora. He ascended with wonderful rapidity, and in about a minute he was almost at the top of the tree. He now went off in a side direction, and caught hold of the branch of a neighbouring tree; he then proceeded towards the heart of the forest. I stood looking on lost in amazement at his singular mode progress.-WATERTON'S WANDERINGS. |