“Mr. Woodward, in his ‘Geology of Norfolk,’ supposes that upwards of two thousand grinders of the mammoth have been dredged up by the fishermen of the little village of Happisburgh in the space of thirteen years. The oyster-bed was discovered here in 1820; and during the first twelve months hundreds of the molar teeth of mammoths were landed in strange association with the edible mollusca. Great quantities of the bones and tusks of the mammoth are, doubtless, annually destroyed by the action of the waves of the sea. Remains of the mammoth are hardly less numerous in Suffolk, especially in the pleistocene beds along the coast, and at Stutton;—they become more rare in the fluvio-marine crag at Southwold and Thorp. The village of Walton, near Harwich, is famous for the abundance of these fossils, which lie along the base of the sea-cliffs, mixed with bones of species of horse, ox, and deer.”[118] [Illustration: SKELETON OF THE MEGATHERIUM CUVIERI (AMERICANUM). ] All the animals of this period are called theroid animals: from _therion_, a wild beast; and looking at the skeletons as they have been arranged from the few existing fossils, or from nearly complete materials—a matter not of guess-work, but of the most rigid application of the principles of comparative anatomy—we stand astounded at the prodigious sizes of these mammoths of the tertiary era. There is the _deinotherium_, or fierce wild beast; the _palæotherium_, or ancient wild beast; the _anoplotherium_, or unarmed wild beast, and others. We give above a drawing of the well-known _megatherium_, or great wild beast, to be seen in the British Museum, and add the following from Mantell’s Guide to the Fossils of the British Museum:—“This stupendous extinct animal of the sloth tribe was first made known to European naturalists by a skeleton, almost entire, dug up in 1789, on the banks of a river in South America, named the Luxon, about three miles south-east of Buenos Ayres. The specimen was sent to Madrid, and fixed up in the Museum, in the form represented in numerous works on natural history. A second skeleton was exhumed at Lima, in 1795; and of late years Sir Woodbine Parish, Mr. Darwin, and other naturalists have sent bones of the megatherium, and other allied genera, to England. The model of the megatherium has been constructed with great care from the original bones, in the Wall-cases 9, 10, and in the Hunterian Museum. The attitude given to the skeleton, with the right arm clasping a tree, is, of course, hypothetical; and the position of the hinder toes and feet does not appear to be natural. Altogether, however, the construction is highly satisfactory; and a better idea of the colossal proportions of the original is conveyed by this model, than could otherwise be obtained.”[119] [Illustration: SKELETON OF THE MASTODON OHIOTICUS, FROM NORTH AMERICA. (Height, 9½ feet; length, 20 feet.) ]