Science Art: Fig. 68, The Two-Toed Sloth, American Types of Animal Life, 1893.

A contented sloth peers out of the pages of St. George Mivart’s American Varieties of Animal Life. I have no idea who the artist is, or even why a book on American animals has aardvarks and koala bears in it, and there are at least three publication years listed on this entry (I went with the one on the front of the title page). The chapter title “WHALES AND MERMAIDS” is even more mysterious, though the contents are what one might expect (manatees!).

Here’s a line worth sharing, though, from the very first page of the first chapter, on monkeys: Most readers are probably, by this time, not a little tired of Darwinian controversy; and certainly we have no intention of dealing with it here.

Tired. Already. More than 100 years ago.

The sloth doesn’t mind, though; the sloth just hangs out. “Hey. How’s it going? Yeah, I’m South American. You?”

Tags: zoology