rom the monkeys to complete the
number), and then place these two groups alongside each other, it
is not easy to conceive ranks more disproportionate in size. (5/7.
The elephant which was killed at Exeter Change was estimated (being
partly weighed) at five tons and a half. The elephant actress, as I
was informed, weighed one ton less; so that we may take five as the
average of a full-grown elephant. I was told at the Surry Gardens,
that a hippopotamus which was sent to England cut up into pieces
was estimated at three tons and a half; we will call it three. From
these premises we may give three tons and a half to each of the
five rhinoceroses; perhaps a ton to the giraffe, and half to the
bos caffer as well as to the elan (a large ox weighs from 1200 to
1500 pounds). This will give an average (from the above estimates)
of 2.7 of a ton for the ten largest herbivorous animals of Southern
Africa. In South America, allowing 1200 pounds for the two tapirs
together, 550 for the guanaco and vicuna, 500 for three deer, 300
for the capybara, peccari, and a monkey, we shall have an average
of 250 pounds, which I believe is overstating the result. The ratio
will therefore be as 6048 to 250, or 24 to 1, for the ten largest
animals from the two continents.) After the above facts, we are
compelled to conclude, against anterior probability, that among the
mammalia there exists no close relation between the BULK of the
species and the QUANTITY of the vegetation in the countries which
they inhabit. (5/8. If we suppose the case of the discovery of a
skeleton of a Greenland whale in a fossil state, not a single
cetaceous animal being known to exist, what naturalist would have
ventured conjecture on the possibility of a carcass so gigantic
being supported on the minute crustacea and mollusca living in the
frozen seas of the extreme North?)

With regard to the number of large quadrupeds, there certainly
exists no quarter of the globe which will bear comparison with
Southern Africa. After the different statements which have been
given, the extremely desert character of that region will not be
disputed. In the European division of the world, we must look back
to the tertiary epochs, to find a condition of things among the
mammalia, resembling that now existing at the Cape of Good Hope.
Those tertiary epochs, which we are apt to consider as abounding to
an astonishing degree with large animals, because we find the
remains of many ages accumu