o be broken down.

The beds including the above fossil remains stand only from fifteen
to twenty feet above the level of high water; and hence the
elevation of the land has been small (without there has been an
intercalated period of subsidence, of which we have no evidence)
since the great quadrupeds wandered over the surrounding plains;
and the external features of the country must then have been very
nearly the same as now. What, it may naturally be asked, was the
character of the vegetation at that period; was the country as
wretchedly sterile as it now is? As so many of the co-embedded
shells are the same with those now living in the bay, I was at
first inclined to think that the former vegetation was probably
similar to the existing one; but this would have been an erroneous
inference, for some of these same shells live on the luxuriant
coast of Brazil; and generally, the characters of the inhabitants
of the sea are useless as guides to judge of those on the land.
Nevertheless, from the following considerations, I do not believe
that the simple fact of many gigantic quadrupeds having lived on
the plains round Bahia Blanca, is any sure guide that they formerly
were clothed with a luxuriant vegetation: I have no doubt that the
sterile country a little southward, near the Rio Negro, with its
scattered thorny trees, would support many and large quadrupeds.

That large animals require a luxuriant vegetation, has been a
general assumption which has passed from one work to another; but I
do not hesitate to say that it is completely false, and that it has
vitiated the reasoning of geologists on some points of great
interest in the ancient history of the world. The prejudice has
probably been derived from India, and the Indian islands, where
troops of elephants, noble forests, and impenetrable jungles, are
associated together in every one's mind. If, however, we refer to
any work of travels through the southern parts of Africa, we shall
find allusions in almost every page either to the desert character
of the country, or to the numbers of large animals inhabiting it.
The same thing is rendered evident by the many engravings which
have been published of various parts of the interior. When the
"Beagle" was at Cape Town, I made an excursion of some days' length
into the country, which at least was sufficient to render that
which I had read more fully intelligible.

Dr. Andrew Smith, who, at the head of his adventurous par