They are chiefly "four-footed beasts of
the earth," and are covered with hair or fur. In this class extremes meet;
we find the great elephant and the playful little squirrel, the kingly lion
and the timid mouse which is said to have set him free when snared in the
hunter's net.
To this class also belong the land-monsters of bygone days, whose skeletons
you may see in museums: such as the Mammoth, or hairy elephant, found in
the British Isles, and also over half the globe; the Mastodon, another
elephantine extinct monster, whose remains are found in America; the Woolly
Rhinoceros, with two large horns on his face, dug out of the frozen soil of
Siberia; the Great Irish Deer, whose antlers measured 9 feet from tip to
tip; and Giant Sloths of South America, inhabitating the same region as the
Sloths of to-day.
But we must leave the "unnumbered, unremembered tribes" of buried creatures
which once trod this earth; and speaking only of those now alive, I
must tell you that in the first Division of the great class, Mammalia,
naturalists place the Quadrumana, or four-handed creatures. This name is
given to all monkeys; because their great-toes are like thumbs, so that
they can take hold of the branches in the forests where they spend their
lives, quite as well with their feet as with their hands.
I need not tell you what they are like, for you know something of the
noisy, chattering, mischievous creatures, from watching them at the "Zoo.
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