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hundred and fifty years, none have been discovered.
The tapir, the jaguar, the puma, the cabiai, the lama,
the vigogne, the red wolf, the buffalo or American
bison, the ant-eaters, sloths, and armadilloes, are
already in Margrave and in Hernandes. as well as
Buffon. We may say that they are there better
described, for Buffon has mingled the history of the
anteaters, misunderstood the jaguar and the red wolf,
and confounded the bison of America with tbe aurochs
of Poland. In fact, Pennant is the first naturalist who
has properly distinguished the little musk ox, but it
had long been pointed out by travellers. The cleft-
footed horse of Molina is not described by the first
Spanish voyagers; but its existence is more doubtful,
and Molina's authority is too dubious to be adopted. It
would be possible to characterize better than at present
the stags of America and the Indies; but with them, as
with the ancients respecting the various antelopes, a
good method of description was wanting, (and not
opportunities of seeing them,) that they might be
better known. We may then say, that the mouflon of
the Blue Mountains is now the only quadruped of
America of any size, the discovery of which is entirely
modern; and perhaps it is only a Siberian goat that has
crossed the ice.
How then can we believe that the enormous
mastodons, the gigantic megatheria, whose remains
have been found under the earth in the two Americas,
can still exist on that continent? How could they
escape those wandering people who incessantly overrun
the country, in every corner of it; and who themselves
acknowledge that they no longer exist, since they have
imagined a fable about their destruction, saying that
they were killed by the
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