And a very large bundle it was, as it lay, in _disjecta membra_, before the astonished eyes of the first learned palaeontologist who gazed, in wondering delight, on its strange proportions. As it rears its ungainly form some eighteen feet above us, Madam, you may gather some idea of what it was in its native forests, I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of years ago. You need not snuggle up to me so, Tommy. The creature is not alive, unless it is enjoying Sydney Smith's idea of comfort, and, having taken off its flesh, is airing itself in its bones. Megatherium was a very proper name for it, if not a very common one; for _large animal_ it was, beyond any dispute, and could scarcely have been much of a pet with the human beings of old, unless "there were giants in those days," and enormous ones at that. How Owen must have gloated over that treasure-trove! Captain Kyd's buried booty would have been worse trash to him than Iago's stolen purse, beside this unearthed deposit of an antediluvian age. Its missing caudal vertebrae would outweigh now, in his anatomical scales, all the hidden gains of the whole race of pirates, past, present, and to come. Think of those bones with all the original muscle upon them! Why, they would outweigh all the worthy members of the Boston Society of Natural History together, unless they are uncommonly obese. Where could Noah have stowed a pair of such enormous beasts, supposing that they existed as late as when the ark was launched? Sloth, indeed! I am inclined to think the five or six tons of flesh these bones must have carried round might reasonably permit the bearer to rank, on _a priori_ reasons, among the most confirmed of sluggards, even if Owen and Agassiz and Wyman had not so decided on strictly scientific, anatomical grounds.