Page:A History of Land Mammals in the Western Hemisphere.djvu/26

2 ''is clothed with hair; a character found in no other animals. In a few mammals the skin is naked, and in still fewer there is a partial covering of scales.'' The list of characters common to all mammals, which distinguish them from other animals, might be indefinitely extended, for it includes all the organs and tissues of the body, the skeletal, muscular, digestive, nervous, circulatory, and reproductive systems, but the two or three more obvious or significant features above selected will suffice for the purposes of definition.

While the structural plan is the same throughout the entire class, there is among mammals a wonderful variety of form, size, appearance, and adaptation to special habits. It is as though a musician had taken a single theme and developed it into endless variations, preserving an unmistakable unity through all the changes. Most mammals are terrestrial, living, that is to say, not only on the land, but on the ground, and are herbivorous in habit, subsisting chiefly or exclusively upon vegetable substances, but there are many departures from this mode of life. It should be explained, however, that the term terrestrial is frequently used in a more comprehensive sense for all land mammals, as distinguished from those that are aquatic or marine. Monkeys, Squirrels, Sloths and Opossums are examples of the numerous arboreal mammals, whose structure is modified to fit them for living and sleeping in the trees, and in some, such as the Sloths, the modification is carried so far that the creature is almost helpless on the ground. Another mode of existence is the burrowing or fossorial, the animal living partly or mostly, or even entirely underground, a typical instance of which is the Mole. The Beaver, Muskrat and Otter, to mention only a few forms, are aquatic and spend most of their life in fresh waters, though perfectly able to move about on the land. Marine mammals, such as the Seals and Whales, have a greatly modified structure which adapts them to life in the sea.

Within the limits of each of these categories we may note