"Tapir" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... adapted from words in the ancient language of the natives in whose country the creatures were first discovered. Puma, jaguar, tapir, and peccary (from paquires) are all names from South American Indian languages. The coyote and ocelot were called coyotl and ocelotl by the Mexicans long before Cortes landed on their shores. Zebra, gorilla, and chimpanzee are native African words, and orang-utan is Malay, ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... detail, W. Kowalewsky has lately shown us the primitive history of the horse, and Leidy and Marsh have further completed it by the addition of American forms, the former having at the same time described the forms which have led to the tapir. ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... forth with his gun, and returned laden with pheasant and mountain hen, and over his shoulder a fine duck, which, unfortunately, however, had already begun to smell—the heat was so intense. In his wanderings he had come upon a huge tapir, half eaten by a tiger, and saw footprints of that lord of the forest in ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... the Daily Telegraph stated in one of the paragraphs of its useful and amusing diary of "London Day by Day,"—"The Tapir," at the Zoological Gardens, is a specimen of a species now "verging on the brink of extinction. He was an old Tory; the world changes, but change he would not." He should be known ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... then clothed with dense forests of palms, tree-ferns, and screw-pines, magnolias and laurels, interspersed with wide-spreading lakes, on the margins of which strange and curious animals fed and flourished. There were large beasts with teeth like the tapir and the bear, and feet like the elephant; and others far more dangerous, half bear, half hyaena, prowling around to attack the clumsy paleotherium or the anoplotherium, something between a rhinoceros and a horse, which grazed ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... make a huge fire to scare away the tigers, which were known to be numerous, and the elephants whose fresh tracks had been crossed and followed during the greater part of the day. The track of a rhinoceros and a tapir had also been seen, but no danger was to be anticipated ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... don't," laughed Frank, feeling particularly good over the grand success that had attended their perilous landing. "Nor a rhinocerous, nor a hippopotamus; but they do have the next largest beast, and that's a tapir. He's something like a big pig and not very dangerous, the senor said. That was what we frightened off just now, ...
— The Aeroplane Boys on the Wing - Aeroplane Chums in the Tropics • John Luther Langworthy |
