While the heavy giant is absorbed in his juicy breakfast, see, there lounges along his neighbour, the Macrauchen. Equally massive, equally heavy, equally vast, equally peaceful, the stranger resembles a huge rhinoceros elevated on much loftier limbs; but his most remarkable feature is an enormously long neck, like that of the camel, but carried to the altitude of that of the giraffe. Thus he thrusts his great muzzle into the very centre of the leafy trees, and gathering with his prehensile and flexible lip the succulent twigs and foliage, he too finds abundance of food for his immense body, in the teeming vegetation, without intruding upon the supply of his fellows. And what enormous mass is suddenly thrust up out of the quiet water of yonder igaripé? A hoarse, hollow grunt, as it comes up, tells us that it is alive, and now we discern that it is the head of an animal--the Toxodon. Half hidden as it is under the shadow of the fan-palms, and the broad, arrowy leaves of the great arums that grow out of the lake, we see the little piggish eyes, set far up in the great head, and wide apart, peeping with a curious union of stupidity and shrewdness; the immense muzzle and lips; the broad cheeks armed with stiff projecting bristles; and, as the creature opens its cavernous mouth to seize a floating gourd, an extraordinary array of incurving teeth, strangely bowed so as to make a series of arches of immense power. Now, with his strong front teeth, he tears up the great fleshy arum-roots from the clay of the bank, and grinds them to pulp; and now, with another grunt, the vast bristly head sinks beneath the water, and we see it no more. Hundreds of other creatures are straying around,--sloths, bats, and monkeys, and birds of gay plumage, on the trees; ant-eaters and cavies, lizards and snakes, on the ground; butterflies and humming-birds hovering in the air; tapirs and turtles and crocodiles in the waters;--but these are matters of course:--we are only thinking of such as have passed away and left no descendants to perpetuate their forms to our own times.