If we examine the anatomy of the armadillo, we shall find that its bones greatly resemble those of the sloth, but still there are a few differences. It is a burrowing animal, and therefore requires great power of scratching and tearing the ground. Why the colossal forms of armadillo should have become extinct and only small ones survived to the present time, is one of the many and perplexing problems presented by the study of extinct animals. One would have thought from its size and strength that the Glyptodon had been built, like Rome, for eternity. CHAPTER XIII. THE MAMMOTH. "Yes, where the huntsman winds his matin horn, And the couched hare beneath the covert trembles; Where shepherds tend their flocks, and grow their corn Where fashion in our gay Parade assembles-- Wild horses, deer, and elephants have strayed, Treading beneath their feet old Ocean's races." Horace Smith. Many are the traditions and tales that have clustered round the Mammoth.[59] He is, however, no fabulous product of the imagination, like the dragon, for he has actually been seen in the flesh, and not only _seen_, but eaten, both by men and animals! But, for all that, men's minds have been busy for centuries past making up tales, often of the wildest description, about him; and it is little wonder that a creature whose bones are found in the soils and gravels, etc., over more than half the world, and whose body has been seen frozen in Siberian ice, should have given rise to many tales and superstitions. To students of folk-lore these legends are of considerable interest, and to some extent also to men of science. To the latter, however, one of its many points of interest is that palæontology may be said to have been founded on the Mammoth. Cuvier, the illustrious founder of the science of organic remains, was enabled, by his accurate and minute knowledge of the structures of living animals, to prove to his astonished contemporaries that the Mammoth bones and teeth, so plentifully discovered in Europe, were not such as could have belonged to any living elephant, and consequently that there must have existed, at some previous period in the world's history, an elephant of a different kind, and quite unknown to naturalists. This was a new idea, and accordingly one that met with opposition as well as incredulity.