What, then, is the history of these old-fashioned animals? Much the same as that of the marsupials, so far as we can read it; for at the same time that opossums were living in Europe, strange animals, with imperfect rootless teeth, and toes with immense claws, bent inwards like the claws of the ant-eaters, were wandering over France and Greece, where we now find their bones. Then, a little later we find, on the shores of the Pacific in North America, other huge imperfect-toothed creatures, which lived, died, and were buried in the mud; and lastly, in South America, still later, we find whole skeletons of gigantic sloth-like animals the size of elephants,[125] which had not yet such long arms as the Sloth of to-day, but walked on four feet upon the ground and browsed upon the trees, while huge armadillo-like creatures,[126] with solid bony shields covering their backs, wandered in the vast forests and lived on animal food. Making use of these facts, then, cannot we picture to ourselves how these large unwieldy creatures, with their stiff bent claws and their weakly teeth, which if once broken or lost could not be replaced by a second set, were no match for the large tigers, bears, and other beasts of prey which were roaming over Europe and Asia; while those, on the contrary, which found their way from North to South America, and were cut off from the crowded world, just as the marsupials were, might live on and fill the land with large creepers and burrowers. In the old world the same would probably happen in Africa, where the sea certainly flowed at one time over the low-lying desert of Sahara; and so the Cape Ant-eater and the Pangolin, both so different from their American relations, would keep their place in the world. This would explain how they gained a firm footing; but the next question is how they kept it, when jaguars and pumas began to roam over America, and lions and panthers over Africa? Now, if we inquire into the history of the Aard-Vark or great Cape ant-eater, which is in many ways much more like the American armadilloes,--for he has like them teeth in the back of his mouth, and walks flat-footed, though he has a thick skin and bristles instead of armour,--we find that he is a very timid animal, and lives almost entirely underground, only venturing out at night to scratch open the ant-hills with his strong claws, so that he may thrust his long sticky tongue into the ant-galleries to draw it back covered with food. Even then he never ventures far from his hole, so we can easily conjecture that it is by concealment that he has escaped destruction.