"Giraffe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... exulted over her joy in finding herself 'eating stewed beef out of Sevres porcelain,' and who, being asked when he came back from the Jardin des Plantes whether he had seen Lacepede, innocently replied: 'No; but I saw La giraffe!'—Carnot, 'Papa Victory,' of whom Lareveillere says that 'nobody could endure his vanity and self-conceit;' and, lastly, Lareveillere himself, whom Carnot in his Memoirs, published at London in 1799, compares to a 'viper,' and says, 'after he has made a speech he coils ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... changes in bones, muscles, blood-vessels, nerves, composing the fore-part of the body, which would be required to make an increment of size in such horns advantageous. Here let me take another instance—that of the giraffe: an instance which I take partly because, in the sixth edition of the Origin of Species, issued in 1872, Mr. Darwin has referred to this animal when effectually disposing of certain arguments urged against his ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... of the camel stem appeared in North America. In the Pliocene arose a llama with the long neck and limbs of a giraffe, whose food was cropped from the leaves and branches of trees. Far more generalized in structure was the Oreodon, an animal related to the camels, but with distinct affinities also with other lines, such as those of the hog and deer. These curious creatures were much like the peccary in ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... should think so, my little Wenceslas!" cried Valerie, calling the artist to her, taking his face in her hands, and kissing his forehead. "A poor boy with no fortune, and no one to depend on! Cast off by a carrotty giraffe! What do you expect, Crevel? Wenceslas is my poet, and I love him as if he were my own child, and make no secret of it. Bah! your virtuous women see evil everywhere and in everything. Bless me, could they not sit by a man ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... the selectionists' theory, chance gave the bird its wings, the fish its fins, the porcupine its quills, the skunk its fetid secretion, the cuttlefish its ink, the swordfish its sword, the electric eel its powerful battery; it gave the giraffe its long neck, the camel its hump, the horse its hoof, the ruminants their horns and double stomach, and so on. According to Weismann, it gave us our eyes, our ears, our hands with the fingers and opposing thumb, it gave us all the complicated and wonderful ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... a zebra, the legs of a rhinoceros, the neck of a giraffe, the head of a bull dog, and three corrugated tails. This monster at once began to growl and run toward her, showing its terrible teeth and lashing its three tails. The Princess snatched the mirror from her basket and, as the creature came near her, she held the glittering ...
— The Surprising Adventures of the Magical Monarch of Mo and His People • L. Frank Baum
... current issues: overgrazing; soil erosion; deforestation; desertification; wildlife populations (such as elephant, hippopotamus, giraffe, and lion) threatened because ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... of Gueldersdorp, that stalwart Yorkshireman, mighty hunter of elephant, rhino, giraffe, and lion in the reckless days of bloodshed that were before the introduction of the Game Laws into South Africa, was saying to ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... the home. This is a mistake. The same precocity of girls appears to exist even among the uncivilised, and independently of the special circumstances of life. It is even found among animals also, and is said to be notably obvious in giraffes. It will hardly be argued that the female giraffe leads a more confined and ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... called the High Veldt. 'Member it wasn't the Low Veldt, or the Bush Veldt, or the Sour Veldt, but the 'sclusively bare, hot, shiny High Veldt, where there was sand and sandy-coloured rock and 'sclusively tufts of sandy-yellowish grass. The Giraffe and the Zebra and the Eland and the Koodoo and the Hartebeest lived there; and they were 'sclusively sandy-yellow-brownish all over; but the Leopard, he was the 'sclusivest sandiest-yellowish-brownest ...
— Just So Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... near Athens, MM. Wagner and Roth have described a deposit in which they found the remains of the genera Mastodon, Dinotherium, Hipparion, two species of Giraffe, Antelope, and others, some living and some extinct. With them were also associated fossil bones of the Semnopithecus, showing that here, as in the south of France, the quadrumana were characteristic of this period. The whole fauna ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... looks at you as if you were a giraffe or something and she would like to take a pot at you ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... said his father could let me have it for a month on trial. Jackson, junior, was anxious to go away without the horse, but I told him to wait a bit while I put on the harness. The animal was of a mouse colour, very tall, something like a giraffe; and by the time I got him between the shafts, I could see that he was possessed by a devil of some kind. It might be a winged one who would fly away with me; so, in order to have a clear course, I led him through the gateway into the middle of the road, and while Jackson, junior, ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... with a modest yet most magnificent sense of its limited dimensions, had from the first opined would not hold more than two enormous portmanteaus in some odd corner out of sight (portmanteaus which could now no more be got in at the door, not to say stowed away, than a giraffe could be persuaded or forced into a flower-pot): that this utterly impracticable, thoroughly hopeless, and profoundly preposterous box, had the remotest reference to, or connection with, those chaste and pretty, not to say gorgeous ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... Erasmus Darwin and Buffon were not so much as named. Mr. Wallace, on the contrary, at once raised the Lamarckian spectre, and declared it exorcized. He said the Lamarckian hypothesis was "quite unnecessary." The giraffe did not "acquire its long neck by desiring to reach the foliage of the more lofty shrubs, and constantly stretching its neck for this purpose, but because any varieties which occurred among its antitypes with a longer ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... The King's Giraffe died on Sunday week, at the Menagerie at Sandpit-gate, near Windsor. It was nearly four years and a half old, and arrived in England in August, 1827, as a present from the Pacha of Egypt to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 395, Saturday, October 24, 1829. • Various
... masculine edition of his mother not much higher than Fred's shoulder—which made it the harder that he should be held superior—was always as simple as possible, and thought no more of Fred's disinclination to scholarship than of a giraffe's, wishing that he himself were more of the same height. He was lying on the ground now by his mother's chair, with his straw hat laid flat over his eyes, while Jim on the other side was reading aloud from that beloved writer who has made a chief ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... down upon her husband, and says, after a pause worthy of an actress, "I am neither a Strasburg goose nor a giraffe!" ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... word of it, from the moment she explosively told him that it was all very well to hee-haw up there like a doited giraffe, and his mind felt the same pleasure that the palate gets out of a good curry as she told him that the English were a miserable, decadent people who were held together only by the genius and application of the Scotch, that ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... picture of a {illust.}. It is a giraffe It is part of the old sign-language out of which ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... indeed of all the animated world around us; how marvellously are these names adapted often to bring out the most striking and characteristic features of the objects to which they are given. Thus when the Romans became acquainted with the stately giraffe, long concealed from them in the interior deserts of Africa, (which we learn from Pliny they first did in the shows exhibited by Julius Caesar,) it was happily imagined to designate a creature combining, though with infinitely ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... newcomer has but a theoretical knowledge at best of all these animals; and he is intensely interested in identifying the various species. The hartebeeste and the wildebeeste he learns quickly enough, and of course the zebra and the giraffe are unmistakable; but the smaller gazelles are legitimate subjects for discussion. The wonder of the extraordinary abundance of these wild animals mounts as the hours slip by. At the stops for water or for orders the passengers gather from their different compartments to detail excitedly ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... Siwalik series, are famous on account of the great variety and large size of many of the vertebrate fossil remains which they have yielded. In these beds to the north of the Salt Range there have been found remains of Dinotherium, forms related to the ancestors of the giraffe and various other mammals, some of them, like the Sivatherium, Mastodon, and Stegodon, being animals of great size. On the northern side of the Salt Range three fairly well-defined divisions of the Siwalik series have been recognised, each ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... the opposite side of the avenue and her head was in the air. She had long since ceased to carry her spine in a tubercular droop and when she chose she could draw her body up until it seemed to elongate like the neck of a giraffe, and overtop Mortimer or whoever happened to have ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... be him," announced Teddy with a comprehensive wave of the hand as they passed the giraffe, which stood silent in his roped enclosure, his head ...
— The Circus Boys Across The Continent • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... could not resist temptation. Lifting his gun, he let drive at the last, a young cow. By some extraordinary chance the ball struck it full on the back of the neck, shattering the spinal column, and that giraffe went rolling head over heels just like a rabbit. I never saw a ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... elephant (or rather the megatherium) to the giraffe, so is the colossal business block of Chicago to the sky-scraper of New York. There is a proportion and dignity in the mammoth buildings of Chicago which is lacking in most of those which form the jagged sky-line of Manhattan Island. For one reason or another—no doubt some difference ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... their special carriage and wrote their last letters home, which would be mailed at Nakuro. But with the morning they were in the game country, and took advantage of the first stop to resume their seats in front. Now everything was changed. At one moment they would pass a group of giraffe, running in their ungainly fashion to one side; hartebeests, impalla and other varieties of antelope were everywhere, gazing in fearless fashion at the train. Herds of zebra came into sight, while through the trees ...
— The Rogue Elephant - The Boys' Big Game Series • Elliott Whitney
... purifying of the blood by breathing, the burning of a candle, and the rusting of iron are all cases of oxidation: or that the colouring of the underside of a red-admiral's wings, the spots of the giraffe, the shape and attitude of a stick-caterpillar, the immobility of a bird on its nest, and countless other cases, though superficially so different, agree in this, that they conceal and thereby protect ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... prophetic strain is that vision of Amy's feelings as the inebriated nawab stumbles hazily into the drawing-room, steaming fulsomely of chilma! And that picture of the African jungle, with Smifzer in puris mounted on a high-trotting giraffe, with his twelve dusky brides around him,—Cruikshank alone could do it justice. But the triumph of the poem is in the high-toned sentiment of civilisation and moral duty, which, esteeming 'the grey ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... hold out but little hopes of their meeting giraffes anywhere on that part of the Limpopo. He had heard of one or two having been occasionally seen; but it was not a giraffe country, ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... river, and large cakes were floating past, accumulating at the bend below the town and raising the water level well above the top of the Marquis's dam. The river was what Joe Ferris had a way of calling "swimmin' deep for a giraffe." ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... only baby who never makes a noise (Which must be very puzzling to little girls and boys). Yet the Giraffe is happy 'though he cannot shout or sing, For with that great long neck of his ...
— Animal Children - The Friends of the Forest and the Plain • Edith Brown Kirkwood
... said was very plausible. Between an ostrich of great height and a giraffe of medium height, seen at a certain distance, it is easy to make a mistake. If it were a question of a beak or a nose, both are none the less joined to the end of a long neck turned backward, and, strictly ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... Darwin's theory of racial inheritance or evolution, was that changes in animal life, wild or domestic, were brought about by the addition of very slight, perhaps imperceptible, variations. He argued that the giraffe with the longest neck could browse on higher leaves in time of drought and hence left offspring with slightly longer necks than the ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... African animals, such as the giraffe and the different kinds of antelopes, mixed with Arabian mottoes; and the patterns are generally woven with gold. This is merely gilt parchment, the silk ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... Nilus's shore, The Bearded Lady with her (h)airs and graces, The Aztec Children with their normal faces, The Twins of Siam—rarest of dualities— Two ever separate, ne'er apart realities? The Family of Albinos? the Giraffe? The famous Baby Show that made you laugh? The Happy Family—cats, rats, doves, hawks, harmonious? Their voices blend in tones euphonious. The great Sea Lion from Pacific's coast, The "Monarch of ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... Alps, and the forest which clustered on their ramparts a growth no more considerable than our Scottish heath. Again the cliff yawned, but now with a deeper entry; and the Casco, hauling her wind, began to slide into the bay of Anaho. The cocoa-palm, that giraffe of vegetables, so graceful, so ungainly, to the European eye so foreign, was to be seen crowding on the beach, and climbing and fringing the steep sides of mountains. Rude and bare hills embraced the inlet upon either hand; it was enclosed to the landward by a bulk of shattered mountains. ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... following your meteoric career in the papers! As I nibble at my toast of a morning I prop the New York Herald against the water giraffe and read, spilling my coffee down my neck: 'The life of the party was Right Tackle Thayer. Seizing the elongated sphere and tucking it under his strong left arm, Thayer dashed into the embattled line of the helpless adversary. Hurling the foe right and ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... top and I pulled Nelly Martin's hair, and was sent down three. Then I was fourth, and my pencil squeaked my slate and I was sent down six. Then Cyril had to spell 'giraffe,' and I said 'one r and two f's,' and she ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... and tried our best to see the procession; but the floor was pretty much on a level, and, though I stood on tiptoe, all that I could see was, now and then, the head of an eagle, or a bear, or a giraffe, rising above the crowd, while the music rang out in thunders of sweet sounds, and the people swarmed in and out of the little square pews in the galleries, like bees hiving on a ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... Paris when the giraffe, sent to that country, arrived. She and her keeper, Ati, landed at Bordeaux, amidst most enthusiastic acclamations, which accompanied them all the way to the metropolis. A deputation from each large town through which she passed, formed of the municipal authorities, met her, and ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... sole of the foot, and also at the place which rubs against the little toe. Unless they are heavy, it is not easy to find them with the foot; travellers in South Africa cut them out from any thick raw hide—that of giraffe, rhinoceros, or sea-cow does admirably. A wooden stirrup may be cut or burnt out of a block. It should have lead melted into it to give it sufficient weight. A stick and a thong, as shown in the figure, is ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... well-nigh would have been impossible; but he betrayed a lack of caution when, having broken his former record by eating thirty-six raw eggs at a sitting, he climbed upon a steam merry-go-round, shortly thereafter falling off the spotted wooden giraffe which he rode, and being removed to the city hospital ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... in the river valleys. Leopards, both spotted and black, are numerous and often of great size; hyaenas are found everywhere and are hardy and fierce; the lynx, wolf, wild dog and jackal are also common. Boars and badgers are more rarely seen. The giraffe is found in the western districts, the zebra and wild ass frequent the lower plateaus and the rocky hills of the north. There are large herds of buffalo and antelope, and gazelles of many varieties and in great numbers are met with in most parts of the country. Among ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... taken first prize, and Davy's only second. On the other hand, Keturah, his cow, had taken only third; but old Sandy McKitterick had said that Spectacle John was judge, and that he didn't know a cow from a giraffe. And Isaac and Rebekah had taken first, anyhow, and the doctor must come and see the red tickets on them. Gilbert started off through the crowd, but fell a captive by the way. As he passed a Gaelic-speaking group of checked ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... was therefore the paradise of hunters. Besides the lion and the leopard, there were many other great cats, some of remarkable beauty. Besides the elephant, which was in some districts very abundant, there existed two kinds of rhinoceros, as well as the hippopotamus and the giraffe. There was a wonderful profusion of antelopes,—thirty-one species have been enumerated,—including such noble animals as the eland and koodoo, such beautiful ones as the springbok and klipspringer, such fierce ones as the blue wildebeest or gnu. There were two kinds ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... any one, anywhere, and especially with Mr. Gholson, and I liked Lieutenant Helm less than ever, noticing anew the unaccountable freedom with which Camille seemed to think herself entitled to rebuke him. "Oh, I'm in your power," he cried to her, "and I'll call him a spotless giraffe if you want me to! that's what he is; I've always thought so!" The spring-wagon was taking the left fork and he cantered ahead to begin his good-byes there and save her for the last. When he made his adieu to her he said, "Won't you let Mr. Smith halt here ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... towering birds!" he muttered under his breath. "Like ostriches in form, but as tall and graceful as a giraffe! There is a man riding astride the neck of each of them, yet he could scarcely reach ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... of an artisan was looked upon as an entirely different species of animal from a man born of a noble, it made him no more uncomfortable or ashamed to remain that different species of animal, than it makes a horse ashamed to remain a horse, and not to become a giraffe. But now that a man may make money, and rise in the world, and associate himself, unreproached, with people once far above him, not only is the natural discontentedness of humanity developed to an unheard-of extent, whatever a man's position, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... like a mole or a subterranean fish, you have eyes and dont want to see, you will lose your eyes. If you like eating the tender tops of trees enough to make you concentrate all your energies on the stretching of your neck, you will finally get a long neck, like the giraffe. This seems absurd to inconsiderate people at the first blush; but it is within the personal experience of all of us that it is just by this process that a child tumbling about the floor becomes a boy walking erect; and that a man sprawling on the road with a bruised chin, or supine ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... use and disuse are transmitted to offspring. So, too, thought Lamarck, who half a century before Darwin propounded a theory of the origin of species that was equally evolutionary in its way. Why does the giraffe have so long a neck? Lamarck thought it was because the giraffe had acquired a habit of stretching his neck out. Every time there was a bad season, the giraffes must all stretch up as high as ever they could towards the leafy tops of the trees; and the one that stretched up farthest survived, ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... elephants, who were slowly approaching, waving their trunks slowly, and bearing on their broad backs a crowd of women with light umbrellas, of children with straw hats and colored ribbons. Following the elephant came a giraffe carrying his small and haughty head very high. This singular caravan wound through the circuitous road, with many ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... other. And Peter, watching them and listening to their music, made a curious discovery about himself. Deeply buried in Peter's soul were the ghosts of all sorts of animals; Peter had once been a boa-constrictor, Peter had once been a bear, Peter had once been a rabbit and a giraffe, a turkey and a fox; and now under the spell of this weird music these dead creatures came to life in his soul. So Peter discovered the meaning of "jazz," in all its weirdly named and ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... supplies, which placed us in a position to move again immediately. The question now arose as to whether it would be best to remain where we were a few days longer to gain more experience, or to trek at once over the Mau, with a chance at giraffe on the way, and so on into the Sotik country, with its alluring promises of ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... amazing being was thrice or four times the bulk of the mightiest elephant. It stood highest—a good thirteen feet—over the haunches (which were supported on legs like columns), and sloped abruptly to the lower and lighter-built fore-shoulders. The neck was like a giraffe's, but over twenty feet in length to its juncture with the mild little head, which looked as if Nature had set it there as a pleasantry at the expense of the titanic body. The tail, enormous at the base and tapering gradually ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... on their ramparts a growth no more considerable than our Scottish heath. Again the cliff yawned, but now with a deeper entry; and the Casco, hauling her wind, began to slide into the bay of Anaho. The coco-palm, that giraffe of vegetables, so graceful, so ungainly, to the European eye so foreign, was to be seen crowding on the beach, and climbing and fringing the steep sides of mountains. Rude and bare hills embraced the inlet upon either hand; it was enclosed to the landward by a bulk of shattered ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Darwin is to be defended, it may be shown that those witticisms, aimed at him, about the giraffe getting its long neck by continually stretching it, or the whale getting its tail by holding its hind legs too close in swimming, do not apply to Darwinism, but to the exploded theory of ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis
... am quite clever," said Saltash, as again his hand met Jake's. "Too clever sometimes. I needn't ask if all goes well with you, Jake. Your prosperity is obvious, but don't wax fat on it. Bunny now—he's as lean as a giraffe. Can't you do something to him? He looks as if he'd melt into thin ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... extravagant. The mind of the Englishman does not readily accept anything he cannot see or even sometimes anything he can see which is unprecedented in his experience, so that like the West American farmer, confronted for the first time by the sight of a giraffe, his impulse is to cry out angrily: "I don't ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... Commodus killed a camelopardalis or Giraffe, (Dion, l. lxxii. p. 1211,) the tallest, the most gentle, and the most useless of the large quadrupeds. This singular animal, a native only of the interior parts of Africa, has not been seen in Europe since the revival of letters; and though M. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... plains standing empty to the sun, the wind, and the rain. The country bore some resemblance to the country west of Redjaf on the White Nile, the home of the giant eland; only here there was no big game, no chance of seeing the towering form of the giraffe, the black bulk of elephant or buffalo, the herds of straw-colored hartebeests, or the ghostly shimmer of the sun glinting on the coats of roan and eland as they vanished silently in the gray sea of ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... is sometimes found eating dogs, cats, rats, porcupines, snakes, lizards, tortoises, locusts, and white ants, or is forced to seek the seeds of wild grasses, or to pluck wild herbs, fruits, and roots; whilst at the proper seasons they hunt the wild elephant, buffalo, giraffe, zebra, pigs, and antelopes; or, going out with their arrows, have battues against the guinea-fowls and ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... then! The elephant on the top, and his trunk stretched out; in a minute or two he would have unfastened the wire; the giraffe's long neck was stretched out; one dove flew away directly, and some crows sat on the eaves. Mr. and Mrs. Dyer and Jedidiah started back, while the elephant with his trunk helped out some of the smaller animals, who stepped into rows on the ironing-board ...
— The Last of the Peterkins - With Others of Their Kin • Lucretia P. Hale
... The stranger resembles the huge rhinoceros, elevated on much loftier limbs. But his most remarkable feature is the enormously long neck, like that of the camel, but carried to the altitude of that of the giraffe. Thus he thrusts his great muzzle into the very centre of the leafy trees, and gathering with his prehensile and flexible lip the succulent twigs and foliage, he too finds abundance of food for his immense body in the teeming ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... and to their delight, they saw the great polar bear, the black bear and many others of which they had seen illustrations, and after watching them as much time as they could spare they passed on to see the giraffe, and from thence to the pen of the zebra. They were earnestly engaged in counting its beautiful stripes when from a great tent near they heard the sound of some wild and warlike instrument which seemed to serve as a summons, for people were hurrying to the tent. ...
— Pixy's Holiday Journey • George Lang
... among strangers, calculate with considerable certainty whether it will be more conducive to his happiness to sing, "Croppies Lie Down," or "The Battle of Ross." As for Billy Crow, long life to him! you might as well attempt to pass a turkey upon M. Audubon for a giraffe, as endeavor to impose a Papist upon him for a true follower of King William. He could have given you more generic distinctions to guide you in the decision than ever did Cuvier to designate an antediluvian mammoth; so that no sooner had he seated ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... that his body became all eyes. In this myth may be seen exemplified the effect of Desire and Will in the forms of life, function and shape—all following Desire and Need, as in the case of the long neck of the giraffe which enables him to reach for the high branches of the trees in his native land; and in the long neck and high legs of the fisher birds, ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... productions, partly known to Pliny (v. 8), who notices "the calamus, the papyrus, and the animals" of the Nigris and the Nile. The black-maned lion and the leopard rule the wold; the gorilla, the chimpanzee, and other troglodytes affect the thinner forests; the giraffe, the zebra, and vast hosts of antelopes scour the plains; the turtle swims the seas; and the hippopotamus, the crocodile, and various siluridae, some of gigantic size, haunt the lakes and rivers. The nymphaea, lotus or water-lily, forms rafts ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... in the country we have traversed; it is too populous. On the other side of the mountains, if we return that way, we shall find them in plenty. Wherever the antelopes are in herds, wherever you find the wild horse, zebra, and giraffe, you will as certainly find the lion, for he preys ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... clattering of hoofs behind him, and Ribsy came galloping along the road, with nothing on him but his collar. He was holding his big head high in the air, like a giraffe, and gazing proudly about him as he ran. He stopped short when he saw the little boy, and, giving a triumphant whistle, said cheerfully, "How ...
— Davy and The Goblin - What Followed Reading 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' • Charles E. Carryl
... senseless fears. Those who are responsible for them in captivity are constantly harassed by fears that they will stampede in their stalls or yards, and break their own necks and legs in most unexpected ways. They require greater vigilance than any other hoofed animals we know. Sometimes a giraffe will develop foolishness to such a degree as to be unwilling to go out of its own huge door, into a shady and ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... finer here than in any part of the world, and have been known to carry tusks exceeding 500 lb. the pair in weight. The principal wild animals besides these are the lion, leopard, hyena, fox, pig, Cape buffalo, gnu, kudu, hartebeest, pallah, steinboc, and the little madoka, or Saltiana gazelle. The giraffe, zebra, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus are all common. The game-birds are the bustard, florikan, guinea-fowl, partridge, quail, snipe, various geese and ducks, and a very dark-coloured rock-pigeon or sand-grouse. The birds in general have ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... been so kind to his boys, and both the young bosses, to a wild place where they would find game in abundance, and where the forests held the great rhinoceros, plenty of elephants, and amongst whose open glades the tall giraffe browse the leafage of the high trees. There in the plains were herds of buffalo too numerous to count, quagga, zebra, gnu, eland, and bok of all kinds. There was a great river there, he said, full of fish, and with great crocodiles ready to seize upon the unwary. ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... liable to be much help to anybody. But I'm awful willin' to try. And sometimes, you know— sometimes surprisin' things happen. 'Twas a—a mouse, or a ground mole, wasn't it, that helped the lion in the story book out of the scrape? . . . Not that I don't look more like a—er—giraffe than I do like a mouse," ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Christchurch stands sixteen feet from the ground, and its various proportions are all of a character to harmonize with its remarkable height. This skeleton shows the marvellous bird to have been, when standing upright, five feet taller than the average full-grown giraffe. It belonged to the giants who dwelt upon the earth perhaps twenty thousand years ago, in the period of the ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... all beasts, and can do everything save read, write, and cast accounts." People would surely have said, "Nonsense; your elephant is contrary to nature"; and have thought you were telling stories—as the French thought of Le Vaillant when he came back to Paris and said that he had shot a giraffe; and as the king of the Cannibal Islands thought of the English sailor, when he said that in his country water turned to marble, and rain fell as feathers. They would tell you, the more they knew ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... 100 deg.F. to below freezing-point in 24 hours. There are a number of definite caravan routes connecting Timbuctoo and the Central Soudan with the Niger and coast-lands. Dates and salt are the chief products; the giraffe, wild ass, lion, ostrich, python, &c., are found; it is chiefly inhabited by nomadic and often warlike Moors, Arabs, Berbers, and various negro races. The greater part is within the sphere of French influence. "When the winds waken, and lift ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Similarly, if there had been a thousand generations of men who used their arms but slightly, we should expect their descendants to show but a puny development of the upper extremities. Now let us apply all this to the animal kingdom in general. The giraffe, for instance, is a ruminant whose entire frame has been adapted to support an enormously long neck, which is of use to the animal in reaching the foliage of trees. The ancestors of the giraffe, having had ordinary necks, were supposed by Lamarck ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... "moose-wood." He peels off the bark from old trees of this sort, and feeds upon it, as well as upon several species of mosses with which the arctic regions abound. It will be seen that in these respects he resembles the giraffe: he may be regarded as the giraffe ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... other species of animals that inhabit the country around them—even the strong heavy rhinoceros is not feared by them, though the latter frequently foils and conquers them. Young elephants sometimes become their prey. The fierce buffalo, the giraffe, the oryx, the huge eland, and the eccentric gnoo, all have to succumb to their ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... city. He won Naples to a new alliance by a diplomatic visit that proved his skill in foreign negotiations. The gifts that came to him from strange lands were presented, in reality, to the master of the Florentine "republic." Egypt sent a lion and a giraffe, which were welcomed as wonders of the East even by those who did not appreciate the fact that they showed a desire to trade. It was easy soon to find new markets for the rich burghers whose class was in complete ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... Giddiness kapturno. Giddy, to make kapturnigi. Gift donaco. Gift, to make a donaci. Gifted talenta. Gild orumi. Gill (fish) branko. Gilliflower levkojo. Gimlet borileto. Gin gxino. Ginger zingibro. Gingerbread mielkuko. Gipsy nomadulo. Giraffe gxirafo. Gird zoni. Girdle zono. Girl knabino. Give doni. Give back redoni. Give up forlasi. Give evidence atesti. Give notice sciigi. Glacier glaciejo. Glad gxoja. Gladden gxojigi. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... sick jackaroo that was pickin'-up at Big Billabong," said the Giraffe. "He had to knock off the first week, an' he's been here ever since. They're sendin' him away to the hospital in Sydney by the speeshall train. They're just goin' to take him up in the wagonette to the railway station, an' I thought ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... people think, and, in any case, there was no inducement to make a display in my presence. What influence could I possibly exercise over the fortunes of that great female? A maternal hippopotamus in the Zoo would as soon think of hugging a young giraffe to propitiate the spectators. Of course you may take up the position that the hypocrisy is practised all day before her mistress, and that the mere momentum of habit carries it on at other times. This is plausible, ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... the intercrossing of existing forms, and above all to the actual efforts of animals themselves. In other words, he had not discovered natural selection, the cardinal idea of Charles Darwin's epoch-making book. For him, the giraffe had acquired its long neck by constant reaching up to the boughs of trees; the monkey had acquired its opposable thumb by constant grasping at the neighbouring branches; and the serpent had acquired its sinuous shape by constant wriggling ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... This tall Giraffe, Measures ten feet and a half, And I wonder if his neck Of rubber is made. Out of the sun He thinks he has run But only his feet ...
— Twilight Stories • Various
... sharp-pointed stakes were fixed, the pits being then carefully covered over with branches and grass, so as completely to conceal them. Similar pitfalls are used in many parts of Africa for entrapping the giraffe and other ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... principal owner of the show, who had made fun of him: "Here's your elephant, and whenever any of your old animals get on the warpath, and you want 'em rounded up, don't forget my number, 'cause I can knock the spots out of any animal except a giraffe." The crowd cheered pa again and he got down off the elephant, took off his fire extinguisher, and handed Bolivar a piece of rag carpet, and said: "Eat it, you old catamaran, or I'll kill you," and Bolivar was so scared of pa he ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck
... pastoral about the tall one, though. She's alive all the way from her runover heels to the wiggly end of the limp feather that flops careless like over one ear. She's the long-waisted, giraffe-necked kind; but not such a bad looker if you can forget the depressin' costume. It had been a blue cheviot once, I guess; the sort that takes on seven shades of purple about the second season. And it fits her like a damp tablecloth hung on a chair. Her runnin' mate is all in black, ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... to you is, Face the creatures, Or spot them sideways with your weather eye, Just to keep tab on their expansive features; It isn't pleasant when you're stepping high To catch a giraffe smiling ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... the country abounds with game. On one occasion a herd of antelopes crossed the path as tamely as if they had been sheep, and tracks of giraffe and larger game were frequently seen. Guinea-fowl were so plentiful that one of the white men at Mpwapwa told us that he did not trouble to fire at them unless he could ensure killing two ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... country from which it comes. Some natives of Egypt having come to see the one in Paris in the costume of the country, the animal gave evident proofs of joy, and loaded them with caresses. This fact is explained by the circumstance that the Giraffe has an ardent affection for its Arabian keeper, and that it naturally is delighted with the sight of the turban and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume X, No. 280, Saturday, October 27, 1827. • Various
... musical atrocity. A fashion of horses seemed to predominate, but there was also an ostrich (a bearded Frenchman being astride this bird for the moment), a zebra, a lion, and a gaudily emblazoned giraffe. I shuddered as I thought of the evil possibilities that might be suggested to my two companions by this affair. For the moment I was pleased to note that they had forgotten my supposed indisposition, yet another ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... snarled Slivers, prodding the ground with his wooden leg, as he always did when angry. 'Neither are you. What do you mean by banging into my office like an insane giraffe?'—this in allusion to Mrs ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... long legs, a long neck, and short wings, useless for flight. One specimen that has been found is upward of thirteen feet in height. There is no reason why some should not have been much taller. More compares its height to that of a giraffe. The Maoris call this bird the Moa, and their legends and traditions are full of mention of it. When they first came to the island, six or seven hundred years ago, they found these vast birds everywhere, and ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... fell on his knees to the shot, but, recovering, hobbled off disabled, apart from the herd, with a foreleg broken just below the shoulder. Reloading immediately, I ran up to the spot, where I found my first giraffe lying dead, with the ball clean through both shoulders. The second was standing about one hundred paces distant. Upon my approach he attempted to move, but immediately fell, and was despatched by my eager ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... that lion's cage, because Suppose he'd open his horrible jaws! —But look! the clown is coming! Of course Facing the tail of a spotted horse And shouting out things to make folks laugh, And grinning up at the tall giraffe That placidly paces along and looks Just like giraffes in ...
— Child Songs of Cheer • Evaleen Stein
... of a large giraffe are about nine feet long, and its neck nearly six feet; while its body measures only seven feet in length and slopes rapidly from the neck ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes
... necks to a remarkable height, in search of the young shoots and leaves. Presently we saw one of them turn its head and look towards its dead companion. The next moment a lion burst out from among the bushes and sprang towards the giraffe on the ground. I had fancied that lions never condescended to feast on a dead animal; but probably there was still some little life in the giraffe, or, at all events, having only just been killed, the carcase could have had no savoury odour. Directly afterwards we heard a roar, and another ...
— Adventures in Africa - By an African Trader • W.H.G. Kingston
... writers on the subject of varieties and species; . . . but the view here developed renders such an hypothesis quite unnecessary. . . . The powerful retractile talons of the falcon and cat tribes have not been produced or increased by the volition of those animals; . . . neither did the giraffe acquire its long neck by desiring to reach the foliage of the more lofty shrubs, and constantly stretching its neck for this purpose, but because any varieties which occurred among its antitypes with a longer neck than ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... had also slightly anticipated Cuvier's law of correlation, giving "a very remarkable example of the mode of procedure to follow in order to solve these kinds of questions by the way in which he had recognized a bone of a giraffe whose skeleton he did not possess" ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... is to place confidence in someone, and it has reference to a person. I say that I know that there is an animal called the horse, and that it has such and such characteristics, because I have seen it; and I say that I believe in the existence of the giraffe or the ornithorhyncus, and that it possesses such and such qualities, because I believe those who assure me that they have seen it. And hence the element of uncertainty attached to faith, for it is possible that a person may be deceived or that he ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... The giraffe is also a source of annoyance. He sometimes applies sufficient force to the bracket on which the wire is fastened to twist it round, causing it to foul other wires. The hippopotamus is also a nuisance, because he uses the poles for rubbing-posts ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... little or no undergrowth. The plains stretched away, to an immense distance. It was in this tract, far below the gazer on the cliff-edge, that romance dwelt in the tents of enchantment. Over it roamed the buffalo, the koodoo, and the giraffe. In the dark hour just before dawn the dew-laden boughs shrouding it trembled to the thunder-tones of the lion as he roared over his kill. Above all, its thickets of mystery had hardly been trodden by ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... denizens of the Australian wilderness, may now be seen in the Regent's Park for the first time in this hemisphere. For the first time, also, the wart hog of Africa there roots, and the hippopotamus displays his quaint gambols; and that "fairest animal," the giraffe, is now beheld in health and vigor, a naturalized inhabitant of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... intellectual powers with, but, as they became a novelty, there was new zest in occasionally seeing them. After I had been there a short time, I heard a call one day: "Heads out!" I ran with the rest and exclaimed, "What is it?" expecting to see a giraffe or some other wonder from Barnum's Museum. "Why, don't you see those boys?" said one. "Oh," I replied, "is that all? I have seen boys all my life." When visiting family friends in the city, we were in the way of making the ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... and as a ring is the sign of marriage by which two are made one, so the Old Man would have himself and the King to be one." Other gifts there were, an elephant of crystal, very cunningly wrought, and a monster which they call a giraffe, also of crystal, and draughts and chessmen, all finely made. The King, on his part, sent to the Old Man a great store of newels, and scarlet cloth, and dishes of gold and bridles ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... horns and fins and trunks and tails so long as they all point to heaven. The ugly animals praise God as much as the beautiful. The frog's eyes stand out of his head because he is staring at heaven. The giraffe's neck is long because he is stretching towards heaven. The donkey has ears to ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... for she passed unscathed through as savage and lion-ridden an area as there is in all Africa—a natural hunting ground which the white man has not yet discovered, where deer and antelope and zebra, giraffe and elephant, buffalo, rhinoceros, and the other herbivorous animals of central Africa abound unmolested by none but their natural enemies, the great cats which, lured here by easy prey and immunity from the rifles of big-game hunters, swarm ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... goose that wears a shawl, Or a gander in coat and hat; I'd just adore a tamed giraffe, Or a literary cat. I'd like a goat with graceful curves, Or a bear with manners neat; A chimpanzee in a cutaway, I think ...
— The Gray Goose's Story • Amy Prentice
... his Principles of Biology twenty-five years ago, and urges that all the adjustments of bones, muscles, blood-vessels, and nerves which would be required during, for example, the development of the neck and fore-limbs of the giraffe, could not have been effected by "simultaneous fortunate spontaneous variations." But this difficulty is fully disposed of by the facts of simultaneous variation adduced in our third chapter, and has also been specially considered in Chapter VI, p. 127. ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... the Lord High Islander rode a giraffe, and Philip longed to ride another. But Lucy said she would rather ride what she was ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... that Natural-Selection acts by slight variations.—These must be useful at once.—Difficulties as to the giraffe; as to mimicry; as to the heads of flat-fishes; as to the origin and constancy of the vertebrate, limbs; as to whalebone; as to the young kangaroo; as to sea-urchins; as to certain processes of {viii} metamorphosis; as to the mammary gland; as to certain ape characters; ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... cocked jauntily, impatiently shuffled their sandals of giraffe hide, and hitched up their belts in which were ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... Jungleland. The Hartebeest and the Wildebeest, the Amusing Giraffe and the Ubiquitous Zebra, the Lovely Gazelle and the ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... a grove of mokhala trees. These, unlike the humbler mimosas, have tall naked stems, with heads of thick foliage, in form resembling an umbrella or parasol. Their pinnate leaves of delicate green are the favourite food of the giraffe, hence their botanical appellation of Acacia giraffae; and hence also their common name among the Dutch hunters of ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... The young lady students of the period were copying those impossible lithographed heads which formed the stock-in-trade of the drawing-master, or those fashion-plate Venuses whose necks recalled the proportions of the giraffe, with the eyelashes of a wax doll, and fingers that tapered off like the point of a pencil. These sirens of the drawing-board were invariably smelling a rose or kissing a canary, and always had a weakness for pearls. They ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... framework of bones being the same in the hand of a man, wing of a bat, fin of a porpoise, and leg of the horse, the same number of vertebrae forming the neck of the giraffe and of the elephant, and innumerable other such facts, at once explain themselves on the theory of descent with slow and slight successive ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... had the callow and awkward ways of a young giraffe, but, though only a three-year-old, he was sedate as an old maid and had the dignity of a churchwarden. His behaviour was an example to his ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... suitable appointments of a court, were kept by many of the princes. 'It belongs to the position of the great,' says Matarazzo, 'to keep horses, dogs, mules, falcons, and other birds, court-jesters, singers, and foreign animals.' The menagerie at Naples, in the time of Ferrante, contained even a giraffe and a zebra, presented, it seems, by the ruler of Baghdad. Filippo Maria Visconti possessed not only horses which cost him each 500 or 1,000 pieces of gold, and valuable English dogs, but a number of leopards brought from all parts of the East; the expense of his hunting ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... I'd been out for a little leg-work and I was just joggin' into the park again, when I hears all kinds of a ruction goin' on over behind the stonewall. There was screams and yells and shouts, like a Saturday-night riot in Double Alley. I pokes up a giraffe neck and sees a couple of women runnin' across the lawn. Pretty soon what they was chasin' comes into view. It was the Commodore. He was pushin' the tea-wagon in front of him, and in the top of that, with just his legs and arms stickin' out, ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... is largely used in the tanning of leather. The mulundo bears a fruit about the size of a cricket ball covered with a hard green shell and containing scarlet pips like a pomegranate. The fauna includes the lion, leopard, cheetah, elephant, giraffe, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, buffalo, zebra, kudu and many other kinds of antelope, wild pig, ostrich and crocodile. Among fish are the barbel, bream and African ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... division comprises arguments from example. That is, if a truth be asserted of an individual, it can therefore be predicated of the class to which the individual belongs. For instance, if the first time a person saw a giraffe, he observed that it was eating grass, he would be justified in saying that giraffes are herbivorous. All gold is yellow, heavy, and not corroded by acid, though no one has tested it all. However, every giraffe does not have one ear ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... been produced or increased by the volition of those animals; but among the different varieties which occurred in the earlier and less highly organized forms of these groups, those always survived longest which had the greatest facilities for seizing their prey. Neither did the giraffe acquire its long neck by desiring to reach the foliage of the more lofty shrubs, and constantly stretching its neck for the purpose, but because any varieties which occurred among its antitypes with a longer neck than usual at once secured a fresh range ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... hypothesis, that the arrangement of bones in the hand of a man, the wing of a bat, the fin of a porpoise, the leg of a horse, should be precisely the same; the number of vertebrae in the neck of a giraffe, and in that of an elephant the same; the primitive germs from which a man, a dog, a frog, and a lobster are gradually evolved, to all appearance the same—the same microscopic atom of homogeneous matter, undistinguishable ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... space in which he moves, is seen to great advantage, and is considered to be the largest of his species in Europe. Near the entrance, on the right, is the museum of natural curiosities, the collection of which is very valuable, and admirably arranged. There is here a fine giraffe, or camelopard, of an amazing height, stuffed. This surprising animal is a native of Ethiopia, and some other parts of Africa, and has scarcely ever been ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... as 'alcohol', 'alembic', 'alkali', 'elixir'. Add to these the names of animals, plants, fruits, or articles of merchandize first introduced by them to the notice of Western Europe; as 'amber', 'artichoke', 'barragan', 'camphor', 'coffee', 'cotton', 'crimson', 'gazelle', 'giraffe', 'jar', 'jasmin', 'lake' (lacca), 'lemon', 'lime', 'lute', 'mattress', 'mummy', 'saffron', 'sherbet', 'shrub', 'sofa', 'sugar', 'syrup', 'tamarind'; and some further terms, 'admiral', 'amulet', 'arsenal', 'assassin', 'barbican', 'caliph', 'caffre', 'carat', 'divan', 'dragoman'{6}, ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... mammals found are as follows: Elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, giraffe, buffalo, zebra, sable and roan antelope, kudu, water buck, blue wilde-beest, impalla, reed buck, bush-buck, steenbok, duiker, klipspringer, mountain ...
— Supplement to Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood |
