. The testimony of the rocks; . , and the onlynative reptile a small, harmless lizard, — has a scarce lessremarkable fauna than either of these great consists almost exclusively of birds, some of them so illprovided with wings, that, like the wika of the natives,they can only run along the ground. And it is a mostsignificant fact, that both in the two great continents andthe New Zealand islands there existed, in the later geo-logic ages, extinct faunas that bore the pjeculiar genericcharacters by which their recent ones are still distin-guished. The sloths and armadilloes of Sout
. The testimony of the rocks; . , and the onlynative reptile a small, harmless lizard, — has a scarce lessremarkable fauna than either of these great consists almost exclusively of birds, some of them so illprovided with wings, that, like the wika of the natives,they can only run along the ground. And it is a mostsignificant fact, that both in the two great continents andthe New Zealand islands there existed, in the later geo-logic ages, extinct faunas that bore the pjeculiar genericcharacters by which their recent ones are still distin-guished. The sloths and armadilloes of South Americahad their gigantic predecessors in the enormous mega-therium and mylodon, and the strongly armed glyptodon;the kangaroos and wombats of Australia had tneir extinctpredecessors in a kangaroo nearly twice the size of thelargest living species, and in so huge a wombat, that its 346 THE XOACIIIAX DELUGE. bones have been mistaken for those of the hippopotamus;and the ornithic inhabitants of Kew Zealand had their Fig. MYLODON 113.
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