Note 2 — Chapter IX · IN CLOUDLAND

There was a time, however, long anterior to the advent of Europeans—during the Pleistocene epoch—when horses2 and the larger members of the camel tribe roamed over the vast plains of South America, notably in the parts now known as Argentina and Southern Brazil. It was at this period, too, that flourished in the same regions those gigantic creatures, now extinct, known as the mylodon, the ground sloth, the glyptodont, the mastodon, the toxodont and peculiar sabre-toothed tigers, vast quantities of whose remains have been found and carefully stored away in our museums. Not far toward the west of us, at the Campo de los Gigantes3 in the Savanna of Bogotá—not to speak of those found in the bluffs along the valley of the Zulia—abundant fossil remains have been discovered of horses, taxodonts, glyptodons, and megatheriums. It is, indeed, a remarkable fact that the South American continent, which has enriched the Old World with so many valuable medicinal and economic plants, has not given to it a single useful animal.