THE SLOTH.

    Miserable Aspect of the Sloth—His Beautiful Organisation for his Peculiar Mode of Life—His Rapid Movements in the Trees—His Means of Defence—His Tenacity of Life—Fable about the Sloth refuted—The Ai—The Unau—The Mylodon Robustus.

‘The piteous aspect, the sorrowful gestures, the lamentable cry of the Sloth, all combine to excite commiseration. While other animals assemble in herds, or roam in pairs through the boundless forest, the sloth leads a lonely life in those immeasurable solitudes, where the slowness of his movements exposes him to every attack. Harmless and frugal, like a pious anchorite, a few coarse leaves are all he asks for his support. On comparing him with other animals, you would say that his deformed organisation was a strange mixture of deficiency and superabundance. He has no cutting teeth, and though possessed of four stomachs, he still wants the long intestines of ruminating animals. His feet are without soles, nor can he move his toes separately. His hair is coarse and wiry, and its dull colour reminds one of grass withered by the blasts of surly winter. His legs appear deformed by the manner in which they are attached to the body, and his claws seem disproportionably long. Surely a creature so wretched and ill-formed stands last on the list of all the four-footed animals, and may justly accuse Nature of step-motherly neglect!’
THE SLOTH.

When seeing a captured sloth painfully creeping along on even ground, sighing and moaning, and scarcely advancing a few steps after hours of awkward toil, the observer might well be478 disposed to acquiesce in the foregoing remarks, and to fancy he had discovered a flaw among the general beauty of the Creator’s works; but let him view the animal in the situation for which it was ordained, and he will soon retract his hasty judgment, and discover it to be no less perfect in its kind, and no less admirably fitted for its sphere of existence, than the most highly organised of the mammalian tribes.

For the sloth, in his wild state, spends his whole life in the trees, and never once touches the earth but through force or by accident. Like the monkey, he has been formed for an exclusively sylvan life, high above the ground, in the green canopy of the woods; but while the nimble simiæ constantly live upon the branches, the sloth is doomed to spend his whole life under them. He moves, he rests, he sleeps suspended from the boughs of trees, a wonderfully strange way of life, for which no other four-footed animal of the Old or the New World has been destined.

And now examine his organisation with reference to this peculiar mode of existence, and all his seeming deficiencies and deformities will appear most admirably adapted to his wants, for these strong, muscular, preposterously long fore-feet, while the hinder extremities are comparatively short and weak, these slender toes armed with enormous claws, are evidently as well suited for clasping the rugged branch as the enormous hind-legs of the kangaroo for bounding over the arid plain. Indeed, in every case, we shall find the fundamental type or idea of the four extremities belonging to the vertebrated animals most admirably modified according to their wants: here shortened, there prolonged; here armed with claws, there terminating in a hoof; here coalescing to a tail, there assuming the shape of a fin; here clothed with feathers to cleave the air, there raised to the perfection of the human hand, the wonderful instrument of a still more wonderful intelligence; and who, seeing all this, can possibly believe that the world is ruled by chance, and not by an all-pervading and almighty power?

Thus the sloth, so helpless when removed from his native haunts, is far from exhibiting the same torpidity in his movements when seen in the place for which Nature fitted him.

‘One day, as we were crossing the Essequibo,’ says Mr.479 Waterton, ‘I saw a large sloth on the ground upon the bank; how he had got there nobody could tell; the Indian said he had never surprised a sloth in such a situation before: he would hardly have come there to drink, for both above and below the place the branches of the trees touched the water, and afforded him an easy and safe access to it. Be this as it may, though the trees were not above twenty yards from him, he could not make his way through the sand time enough to escape before we landed. As soon as we came up to him, he threw himself upon his back, and defe............