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Gorilla   Listen
noun
Gorilla  n.  (Zool.) A large, arboreal, anthropoid ape of West Africa. It is larger than a man, and is remarkable for its massive skeleton and powerful muscles, which give it enormous strength. In some respects its anatomy, more than that of any other ape, except the chimpanzee, resembles that of man.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Gorilla" Quotes from Famous Books



... streets dressed up and walking erect, only do so after much drilling and teaching, just as dogs may be taught to walk in the same way; and the posture is almost as unnatural to the one animal as it is to the other. The largest and most man-like of the apes—the gorilla, chimpanzee, and orang-outang—also walk usually on all-fours; but in these the arms are so long and the legs so short that the body appears half erect when walking; and they have the habit of resting on the knuckles of the hands, not on ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various

... to New York to live, I had explored the Eden Musee. One of the most gruesome of the spectacles which I had seen in its famed Chamber of Horrors was a representation of a gorilla, holding in its arms the gory body of a woman. It was that impression which now revived in my mind. But by a process strictly in accordance with Darwin's theory, the Eden Musee gorilla had become ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers

... turn to primitive man. The recent excavations in Sussex will give us a picture of him. He is a wild, gorilla-like figure that creeps beneath the trees. He can leap with lightning force on his prey. He drapes his body with bearskins, and eats meat from fingers that end in claws. And yet with all his savage ferocity, this is more than an animal. This is a man. ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association

... on the ferry crossing the river she had not yet made up her mind. Jim had no mind to make up. He was reduced to a mere waiter on her orders. He laughed at himself. This morning at daybreak he had been reproaching himself for being a vicious gorilla who had carried off a little girl; now he was realizing that the little girl had carried him off and was making a ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes

... countries where the climate is most uniform, the forests densest, and the supply of fruit abundant throughout the year. These animals are now comparatively well known, consisting of the orang-utan of Borneo and Sumatra, the chimpanzee and the gorilla of West Africa, and the group of gibbons or long-armed apes, consisting of many species and inhabiting South-Eastern Asia and the larger Malay Islands. These last are far less like man than the other three, one or other ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... Charles Dawson, in reconstructing a man from the Piltdown skull, discovered in 1912 on Piltdown Common, near Ucksfield, Sussex, England, built up something essentially monkey-like, with receding forehead, projecting brows, and a gorilla-like lower jaw. Prof. Keith, a renowned specialist, checking up on this reconstruction, comes to an entirely different conclusion. He finds that the work of Drs. Dawson and Woodward was done "in open defiance of all that scientists know about skulls, whether ancient or modern." His words ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner

... the long file spreads itself through the forest in a front line, and attacks and devours all it overtakes with a fury which is quite irresistible. The elephant and gorilla fly before this attack. The black men run for their lives. Every animal that lives in their line of ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes

... approached the cabin. Joan had never before seen two such striking, vicious-looking, awesome men. The one was huge—so wide and heavy and deep-set that he looked short—and he resembled a gorilla. The other was tall, slim, with a face as red as flame, and an expression of fierce keenness. He was stoop shouldered, yet he held his head erect in a manner that suggested a ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey

... trace through the intervening animals of the same species up to the horse, another noble animal. Again, we take up the monkey, and trace him likewise through his upward and advancing orders—baboon, ourang-outang and gorilla, up to the negro, another noble animal, the noblest ...
— The Negro: what is His Ethnological Status? 2nd Ed. • Buckner H. 'Ariel' Payne

... and to look like a Greek god! Wilson's only rival, a gynecologist named O'Hara, got results, too; but he sweated and swore through his operations, was not too careful as to asepsis, and looked like a gorilla. ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... other girls of her class, not too pure and good for human nature's daily food, then the result might be—not at all unpleasant.... Women, pretty girls even, are very cheap in England—a drug in the market, as any young man not positively a gorilla of ugliness must know. It rather saddens me to think what I could do, without being a King Solomon. But for this young girl who is not clever, and lodges in Charlotte Street, and goes every day to her shop, I think I could make a fool of myself. And ...
— Fan • Henry Harford

... the diamonds. He sat with chin on hands and elbows on table, blinking heavily at the blazing array. He was in every way a contrast to the other. No city had bred him. He was heavy-muscled and hairy, gorilla-like in strength and aspect. For him there was no unseen world. His eyes were full and wide apart, and there seemed in them a certain bold brotherliness. They inspired confidence. But a closer inspection would ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London

... their presence, neither their father nor their mother knew what on earth to do with them. Then, too, Eve's household duties were such that they very nearly absorbed all her time, and for years the youthful scions of this first family in the land were left to the tender mercies of a kindly old Gorilla who, however amiable and willing she may have been, was hardly the kind of person a modern mother would choose as an influence in the formative years of her children's development. I am quite aware that in some sections of the country ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs

... feet. It was an impressively effortless motion. There was a thick wide torso on short thick legs under the golden fur. The structure was gorilla-like. Pilli might weigh ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz

... camp was not tenantless. Someone was there. A huge man-like form, a monstrous gorilla, the evil spirit that haunted the forest, bent and gray and old-looking, was picking the things about, sniffing at ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... but a poor zigzag progress from the gorilla; Christianity, just now engaged in blessing the rival banners of warriors setting out for one another's throats, has failed ignominiously to bring the wolf in man to baptism, when the central state of Christian Europe must arm to the teeth one ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... black-and-white ribbon of the Iron Cross showed at a buttonhole. His tunic was all wrinkled and strained as if it could scarcely contain his huge chest, and mighty hands were clasped over his stomach. That man must have had the length of reach of a gorilla. He had a great, lazy, smiling face, with a square cleft chin which stuck out beyond the rest. His brow retreated and the stubby back of his head ran forward to meet it, while his neck below bulged out over his collar. His head was exactly the shape of a pear with ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan

... Joe turned sullen and refused to force the fighting any longer. He stood in front of his corner, stooping his shoulders and swinging his head like a gorilla. Such blows as Sam had been able to land had all been addressed to Joe's right eye. His beauty ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner

... in the district. The harshness of nature is strongly reflected in all faces. Having passed a man on the bank of the stream washing his linen—presumably his own—with bare arms, sinewy and hairy like a gorilla's, I was again in the open country; but instead of following donkey-paths and sheep-tracks I was upon the dusty highroad. Well, even a, route nationale, however hot and dusty, so that it be not too straight, has its advantages, which are felt after ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker

... it inevitably kills; it may be apparently innocuous, if not incidentally beneficial. King Mithridates, it is said, learned habitually to consume these dangerous commodities; and the scarcely less mythical Du Chaillu, after the fatigues of his gorilla warfare, found decided benefit from two ounces of arsenic. But to say that a substance is a poison is to say at least that it is a noxious drug,—that it is a medicine, not an aliment,—that its effects are pathological, not physiological,—and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various

... instance will make the point at issue plain. Everyone knows that in many respects, in the structure of the skeleton, and the curve of the backbone, and in the development of the brain, the man-like monkeys, the gorilla and its allies, are intermediate between man and the lower monkeys. In the early days of evolution it was assumed frequently that the gorilla, etc., were therefore to be regarded as ancestors of man, and they ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell

... Dalmain simply. "I learned that when quite a small boy. My mother took me to hear a famous preacher. As he sat on the platform during the preliminaries he seemed to me quite the ugliest man I had ever seen. He reminded me of a grotesque gorilla, and I dreaded the moment when he should rise up and face us and give out a text. It seemed to me there ought to be bars between, and that we should want to throw nuts and oranges. But when he rose to speak, his face was transfigured. ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay

... in the valley of the Mensa, in Abyssinia, has become classical.(23) The playfulness of the tailed apes and the mutual attachment which reigns in the families of chimpanzees also are familiar to the general reader. And if we find among the highest apes two species, the orang-outan and the gorilla, which are not sociable, we must remember that both—limited as they are to very small areas, the one in the heart of Africa, and the other in the two islands of Borneo and Sumatra have all the appearance of being the last remnants of formerly much more numerous species. The ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin

... agonies of doubt I endured during its advance. No man in a tiger's den, nor deer tied to a tree awaiting its destroyer, could have suffered more than I did then, and my terror increased tenfold when I recognized in the monster—Neppon—a young gorilla that had been under my charge and had given me no end of trouble when I was head keeper in ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell

... With a bestial rumbling in his throat, the sergeant countered with a pile-driving punch to the other's heart; then, ducking his head to avoid further punishment, he grappled with the murderer. Roaring inarticulately in their Berserker rage, the pair bore a closer resemblance to a bear and a gorilla than men. ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall

... possible that in animals like the tiger and lion the force would equal 1700 or 1800 pounds. The anthropoid apes can easily break a cocoanut with their teeth, and Guyot-Daubes thinks that possibly a gorilla has a jaw-force of 200 pounds. A human adult is said to exert a force of from 45 to 65 pounds between his teeth, and some individuals exceed this average as much as 100 pounds. In Buffon's experiments he once found a Frenchman who could exert a force ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... to pry him loose! You have got the grip of the devil himself. The police surgeon told me they would have to put a whole new set of plumbing in his throat. Said he wouldn't have believed that any living thing, short of a gorilla, could have clamped down that hard ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx

... even the rudimentary elements of natural history, I cannot say to what order or genus of the monkey family Jocko belonged; but, roughly speaking, I think he was a specimen of chimpanzee or small gorilla, as he had no tail, and when he walked erect, which was his favourite position, he looked uncommonly like the ...
— Tom Finch's Monkey - and How he Dined with the Admiral • John C. Hutcheson

... poised, the picture of Gore did not inspire terror. In the passengers, it did. They saw a brutal giant, gorilla-like, and roaring like a beast, charging at a half-naked youth apparently only half his size. It seemed that those tremendous arms must break ...
— In the Orbit of Saturn • Roman Frederick Starzl

... goggle-eyed jim-jam Josh, I am grieved to know it. If such was the case, the friends of Confucius should keep the matter from me. I cannot believe that the great philosopher wallowed in the dust at the feet of such a polka-dot carricature of a gorilla's horrid dream. ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye

... small eyes, and the hair grew right down on his forehead, and his whiskers grew right up to his hair, so that there was uncommonly little of his countenance to be seen. Altogether he reminded me forcibly of a gorilla, and yet there was something very pleasing and genial about the man's eye. I remember saying that I ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard

... tube but solid tho it's outer appearance is that of a tube of a Monopetallous corolla swelling as it ascends and gliding in such manner into the limb that it Cannot be Said where the Style ends or the Stigma begins, jointly they are as long as the Gorilla, while the limb is four cleft, Sauser Shaped, and the margin of the lobes entire and rounded. this has the appearance of a monopetallous flower growing from the Center of the four petalled corollar which ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al

... with music. Then his hard-bitten face lights up, although the lines remain hard as ever, hiding his ecstasy, and he remarks gruffly, off-handedly, that he guesses he can play over a few records. And so, every other evening, we watch this killer and driver, with lacerated knuckles and gorilla paws, brushing and caressing his beloved discs, ravished with the music of them, and, as he told me early in the voyage, at such moments ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London

... the entrance, glaring out at us, stood the man we had come to see. It is not hard to remember that first impression of Michael Strange. He was a huge man, gaunt and haggard, moulded with the hunched shoulders and heavy arms of a gorilla. His face seemed to be unconsciously twisted into a snarl. His greeting, which came only after he had stared at us intently, for nearly a minute, was ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various

... resemblance and difference. Consequently, though the apes and monkeys had furnished me with an inexhaustible fund of amusement and interest, I was delighted beyond measure when it was announced that Coriander had secured a live gorilla for his collection of wild beasts. An agent had been dispatched to Africa, and had sent home, with great secrecy, a real live specimen of this dreadful beast; and so well had all the negotiations been kept ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various

... Socrates gave the insolent young man a shock by instantly accepting his challenge. In the bout that followed, the philosopher, built like a gorilla, got a half-Nelson on his man, who was a little the worse for wine, and threw him so hard, jumping on his prostrate form with his knees, that the aristocratic hoodlum was laid up for a moon. Ever after Alcibiades had a thorough respect for Socrates. They became fast friends, and whenever ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard

... perfectly with the mildest flavoured food. There is nothing surprising in this. The strongest, most intelligent, and largest animals are those which feed on grass, herbs and fruits. Even the African lion is no match for the gorilla. The lion and tiger are capable of great strength, but they cannot put it forth for long periods as can the herbivora. Our most useful animal, the horse, can exert much more muscular energy, weight for weight, than any of the carnivora. The cost of feeding one of the herbivora ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan

... encroachments of civilised man. The day is not distant when they will cease to exist in the wild state in any part of Africa, and with them are vanishing many splendid antelopes. Even our "nearest and dearest" relatives in the animal world, the gorilla, the chimpanzee and the ourang, are doomed. Now that man has learnt to defy malaria and other fevers the tropical forest will be occupied by the greedy civilised horde of humanity, and there will be no room for the most interesting and wonderful of all animals, the man-like apes, unless (as we ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester

... of the Princess Pongo, who wore a tasteful toque surmounted by a stuffed baby gorilla, was much admired, and when the score was called "one set all," the enthusiasm of the bystanders knew no bounds. A slight delay was caused by the arrival of a telegram for Mr. BALFOUR, announcing that, in view of the grave importance of the present political situation, The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 18, 1914 • Various

... the fact by stating that the child was torn limb from limb, or to quote his own words, "First outraged with demoniacal cruelty and then taken by her heels and torn asunder in the mad wantonness of gorilla ferocity." ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett

... continued, bitterly: "You used to come in here, the first year, with notions of society women that would have disgraced a Goth, or a gorilla. Did you form your estimate of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... aid, and he flung a lightning glance down that long room, tightening his hold on the revolver—but he did not see the small door that opened in the shadowy paneling behind him, nor the shadow that grew into the gorilla-like shape of the black as it launched itself through the ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley

... Professor Huxley, he remarked at once that it was the most ape-like skull he had ever beheld. Mr. Busk, after giving a translation of Professor Schaaffhausen's memoir in the "Natural History Review," added some valuable comments of his own on the characters in which this skull approached that of the gorilla and chimpanzee. ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell

... ruthlessly cut short and their young left to die in their nests in the agonies of cruel starvation. If we compare with this state of mind that of the African of whom Burton wrote in his Two Trips to Gorilla Land, that "Cruelty seems to be with him a necessity of life, and all his highest enjoyments are connected with causing pain and inflicting death"—we need no other argument to convince us that a savage cannot possibly feel romantic ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... thoughts. The fact that no blood was ever to be shed in this city had reassuring aspects. On the other hand, how many of these Maghrabi stranglers did Bara Miyan keep as a standing army? A Praetorian guard of men with gorilla-hands like the two already seen might, in a close corner, prove more formidable than men armed with the archaic firearms of the place ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England

... to be remembered also that nuts form a substantial part of the diet of that large and interesting family of vertebrates, the primates, represented by the gorilla, the chimpanzee, the orang-utan and the gibbon, animals that do not eat meat, and that man is also a primate. No authority has ever offered any reason why man's diet should differ ...
— Northern Nut Growers Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-First Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association

... first book; it certainly renews in the reader of the present work the satisfaction felt in the comparative reasonableness of the things narrated, and his consequent ability to put an unmurmuring trust in the author. Here, indeed, is very little of the gorilla whom we formerly knew: his ferocity is greatly abated; he only once beats his breast and roars; he does not twist gun-barrels; his domestic habits are much simplified; his appearance here is relatively as unimportant ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various

... himself. Wild and ferocious as is the stallion, he is a civilized and mild-mannered animal compared with his manager. In the matter of facial expression and intellectual development this uncivilized descendant of Ham is first cousin to a wild gorilla, and it is not without certain misgivings that I leave the web-like bicycle-wheel in his charge. He has been a very interesting study of uncivilization all along, and his bump of destructiveness is as large as an orange. The military Afghans, one and all, impress me as being especially ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... all over. 'I—I only thought,' he stammered; 'I've got a book called The Gorilla Hunters—it's a continuation of Coral Island, sir—and it says there that the gorillas (they're big monkeys, you know) ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling

... of the monster proved the salvation of the flyers. It gave them a chance to pull their shattered nerves together and elevate their rifles. As he must keep the light on the creature, which now all recognized as a large gorilla, so that his companions and himself could see to shoot, John had only one arm with which to handle his gun. But he brought the weapon up quickly, and pressed the trigger just as three other shots rang out from the guns of his companions, who had stepped ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser

... It being a holiday, he had not donned his dressing-gown, which on the whole was well for the photographic result. He spoke of other pictures that had been made of him, especially denouncing one photograph, taken some twenty years before by Sarony, a picture, as he said, of a gorilla in an overcoat, which the papers and magazines had insisted ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... my eyes on. His hair and beard were not only long, but tangled and unkempt, and grew so far toward each other as barely to expose a strip of dirty brown skin. His shoulders were bowed and enormous. His arms hung like a gorilla's, palms turned slightly outwards. On his head was jammed a linen boating hat that had once been white; gaping away from his hairy chest was a faded dingy checked cotton shirt that had once been brown and white; his blue ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams

... brain him than anyone else I know, but that would leave that gigantic gorilla to ... why, he'd ... listen, you'll simply have to ...
— Subspace Survivors • E. E. Smith

... and pain he bored in. He had but one chance—to get this shadow in his gorilla-like arms. He lacked mental flexibility. An idea, getting into his head, stuck; it was not adjustable. Like an arrow sped from the bowstring, it had to fulfill its destiny. It never occurred to him to take to his heels, to get space between himself and this enemy ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath

... The baby gorilla, of the family called Ape, Is very like you in size and in shape, But he lives in the jungle with black hair for clothes And he gets very naughty the ...
— Animal Children - The Friends of the Forest and the Plain • Edith Brown Kirkwood

... 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, meaning Man of the Woods. Cheetah is from some East Indian tongue, as is tahr, the name of the wild goat of the Himalayas. Gnu is from the Hottentots, and giraffe from the Arabic zaraf. Aoudad, the Barbary ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe

... enabled to answer those who maintain, that if Mr. Darwin's theory of the Origin of Species is true, man too must change in form, and become developed into some other animal as different from his present self as he is from the Gorilla or the Chimpanzee; and who speculate on what this form is likely to be. But it is evident that such will not be the case; for no change of conditions is conceivable, which will render any important alteration of his form and organization so universally ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace

... for the grip, his hands out like a gorilla's. The quiet voice, from the yawing mouth, beneath the steady, flaming eyes, was deadly. There is something inhuman in ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown

... confined to the Atlas region, wolves and foxes to North Africa. The elephant (though its range has become restricted through the attacks of hunters) is found both in the savannas and forest regions, the latter being otherwise poor in large game, though the special habitat of the chimpanzee and gorilla. Baboons and mandrills, with few exceptions, are peculiar to Africa. The single-humped camel—as a domestic animal—is especially characteristic of the northern ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... AMONG THE GORILLAS; A thrilling story of adventure in darkest Africa. Don is carried over a mighty waterfall into the heart of gorilla land. ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout - or, The Speediest Car on the Road • Victor Appleton

... Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa: with Accounts of the Manners and Customs of the People, and of the Chase of the Gorilla, the Crocodile, Leopard, Elephant, Hippopotamus and other Animals. By Paul B. Du Chaillu. Numerous Illustrations. 8vo, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... his man stiff than any plug in the business. He'd been a champ long ago, if it wa'n't for a chunk of yellow in him as big as a grape fruit. No, I couldn't match up Swifty. I done the next best thing, though; I sent for Gorilla Quigley, and gets Mike Slattery to hold the ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford

... Marjory to respectability so far as her hands went, John asked her to go with him to hear a lecture. Just about that time he was rather wild concerning natural history, for which, I am sorry to say, Marjory did not care a pin. She indignantly repelled the idea of a gorilla somewhere toward the top of her family tree, asserting that she preferred to believe that she had descended from so mean a man as Adam, and so curious a woman as Eve, to that: furthermore, she was indifferent upon the subject. But there was not much ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various

... are—I will not call them false friends—this noun should never follow that adjective. To what shall I liken them—to the young gorilla, that even while its master is feeding it, looks trustingly in his face and thrusts forth its paw to tear him? Who blames the gorilla? Torn from its dam, caged or chained, it owes its captor a grudge. To the serpent? The story of the warming of the serpent ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various

... wore a pale blue dressing-gown and though broad of shoulder seemed not even so tall as Sagorski, but he had a bullet head which at the cerebellum joined his thick neck, without indentation, in a straight line and his arms reached almost to his knees—gorilla of a man—a superbrute. I caught a glimpse of Marcia watching him intently, and tried to read her thoughts. She examined him with the critical gaze which she might have given a ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs

... which "a beneficent necessity (I use his language) is always bringing things right." "It is in the stomach of plants," he says, "that development begins, and ends in the circles of the universe." "'Tis a long way," he admits, "from the gorilla to the gentleman—from the gorilla to Plato, Newton, Shakespeare—to the sanctities of religion, the refinements of legislation, the summits of ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... said Briscoe thoughtfully. "There's plenty of room, and people are too ready to say that nothing more remains to be discovered. Why, only the other day they wouldn't believe in the existence of the gorilla." ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn

... Senator threateningly raised his gorilla-like arms, but let them drop helplessly again. "How did they get into the safe? Did ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony

... without the risk of being heard by the huge apes, I retreated rapidly. I was not aware at the time that I had fallen in with a family of the largest existing specimens of the ape tribe since known as the terrible gorilla, although at that time I was ignorant of its name. I was only too soon to become in a terrible way better ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston

... illustrative, of important truth. They are only great as they are good. If Mr. Foster's art embodied no higher idea than the vulgar notion of the negro as a man-monkey,—a thing of tricks and antics,—a funny specimen of superior gorilla,—then it might have proved a tolerable catch-penny affair, and commanded an admiration among boys of various growths until its novelty wore off. But the art in his hands teemed with a nobler significance. It dealt, in its simplicity, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various

... muscle-bound gorilla!" she jeered. "That I want to see! Any time you want to get both arms broken at the elbows, ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith

... putting aside his normal modesty, "I'm six feet two inches tall, and I weigh two hundred pounds in the pink of condition. I have a forty-eight-inch chest, with five and a half inches chest-expansion, and a reach as long as a gorilla's. My underpinning is good, too; I'm not one of these fellows with spidery legs and a barrel-chest. I can do a hundred yards in ten seconds; I'm no slouch of a swimmer; and at Princeton they say I made football ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne

... this time be so inured to danger in the pursuit of our big game, that we will go and hunt an animal which is, I think, the most dangerous creature with which man can contend. I mean the Gorilla. ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton

... for their lives as for vengeance upon the slayer, for Sebastian was like a gorilla; he seemed intent upon killing them all. He vented his fury upon whatever came within his reach; he struck at men and animals alike, and the shrieks of wounded horses added ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach

... and cowslip are different in appearance (not to mention odour, habitat and range), and as I can now show that, when they cross, the intermediate offspring are sterile like ordinary hybrids, they must be called as good species as a man and a gorilla. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... twirling or not must remain a matter of doubt, but we may rest assured that in the quarter-staff we have, probably, the earliest form of offensive weapon next to the handy stone. If Darwin is correct, we can easily imagine one of our gorilla ancestors picking up a big branch of a tree with which to hit some near member of his family. This, to my mind, would be playing elementary quarter-staff, and the game would have advanced a step if the assaulted one—possibly ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn

... Boards of Health are planning to wipe out typhoid, cholera and the Black Plague. Not otherwise, lovers of their fellow man have finally become perfectly hopeless with reference to the German people. They have no more relations to the civilization of 1918 than an orang-outang, a gorilla, a Judas, a hyena, a thumbscrew, a scalping knife in the hands of a savage. These brutes must be cast ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis

... hairy man from whom the drawing was taken, it could be seen that there was a strong tendency towards a whorled arrangement of the hairs on the backs of the wrists. This is likewise, as a general rule, a marked feature in the arrangement of hair on the same places in the gorilla, orang, and chimpanzee. In the specimen of the latter, however, from which the drawing was taken, this characteristic was not well marked. The downward direction of the hair on the backs of the hands is exactly the same in man as it is ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes

... any odd, fantastic root that comes to hand, and, if it is only bulbous above and bifurcated below, will always contrive to make a man—such as he is—out of it. I should like to see any kind of a man, distinguishable from a Gorilla, that some good and even pretty woman could not ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various

... seraglio of Richelieu's boyish dreams—and put atop of a letter to her! and Providence permitted such an outrage! "Wot was he, Richelieu, sent to school for, and organized wickedness in the shape of gorilla Injins like this allowed to ride high horses rampant over Californey!" He looked at the heavens in mute appeal. And then—Providence not immediately interfering—he thrust his own small arm into the window, regained his priceless treasure, ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte

... Darwinism, that it makes man an improved monkey. Darwin's theory certainly gives to both some vastly remote common ancestor; but it does not maintain the metamorphosis of one into the other. It does not suppose that man was once a gorilla. It supposes that from out of some of the differentiations of some animal form arose the first man-like creature, and that, gradually changing, like other animal forms, some of the varieties eventually evolved into apes and orangoutangs, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various

... a gorilla," he said; "but you are like a sleek tigress. I am stronger, more powerful than you; but I am always in fear of your claws. Especially when you smile like that. What ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath

... leaped in. Blacksnake was still squirming about and clawing for his .45 when the Texan's first blow landed. Blacksnake was burly, powerful. He weighed well over two hundred, and his shoulders were as broad as a gorilla's. But his bullet head went back with a jerk, as the Texan's hard fist thudded heavily on his ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens

... by the superior size and strength of the Thing, by the almost manlike cunning of the low, gorilla face, the gleam of intelligence in the reddened eye, the crude wreath of maple-leaves upon the head, the necklace of finger-bones ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... box, it is incredible, I say, that she should seriously desire to become a mere unconsidered unit in a bevy of Indian brides! How is she possibly to endure a domestic existence exposed to the slings and arrows of a perpetual gorilla warfare from various native aunts and sisters-in-law, or how is she to reconcile her dainty and fastidious stomach, after the luscious and appetising fare of a Bayswater boarding-house, to simple, unostentatious, and frequently repulsive Indian ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey

... shoal!" when once Otoo went into action. I shall never forget what he did to Bill King. It occurred in German Samoa. Bill King was hailed the champion heavyweight of the American navy. He was a big brute of a man, a veritable gorilla, one of those hard-hitting, rough-housing chaps, and clever with his fists as well. He picked the quarrel, and he kicked Otoo twice and struck him once before Otoo felt it to be necessary to fight. I don't think ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine

... time—the skin ebony black and polished over the cheekbones, but the rest of the face almost handsome, except that the slight flare of his nostrils gave him a cast of inhuman ferocity. And the fierceness was given point by a pair of arms of gorilla length; broad shoulders padded with rolling muscles, and the neck of a bull. On the whole, Donnegan, a connoisseur of fighting men, had never seen such promise ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand

... would be just the same again. In your mind's eye turn him round, so as to put his backbone in a position inclined obliquely upwards and forwards, just as in the next three diagrams, which represent the skeletons of an Orang, a Chimpanzee, a Gorilla, and you find you have no trouble in identifying the bones throughout; and lastly turn to the end of the series, the diagram representing a man's skeleton, and still you find no great structural ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley

... hideous to look at, and, accordingly, if he had been a hero a hundred times and had saved a hundred poor little babies' lives, he could not have interested her. Monty followed her around, reminding her, she told Madeline, of a little adoring dog one moment and the next of a huge, devouring gorilla. ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey

... that he was the Republican nominee and had been a "rail-splitter." In the South, so far as one can judge, all that was heard about him was that he was a "Black Abolitionist," which was false, and that in appearance he resembled a gorilla, which was, ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton

... those {spiffy} touch-menu systems failed to notice that humans aren't designed to hold their arms in front of their faces making small motions. After more than a very few selections, the arm begins to feel sore, cramped, and oversized — the operator looks like a gorilla while using the touch screen and feels like one afterwards. This is now considered a classic cautionary tale to human-factors designers; "Remember the gorilla arm!" is shorthand for "How is this going to ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... humour, and enriched with many passages that showed a high and courageous spirit. His scathing denunciations of the system of brutality practised towards the political prisoners in Kilmainham gaol, and his picture of Mr. Governor Price as "the old gorilla," will long be remembered. One portion of his ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown

... upright, to look wildly around. Taylor was on his feet, his hair bristling, the pallor of mingled fear, astonishment, and disgust on his face. Owen grinned sardonically at him. "Lay down an' turn over, you wall-eyed gorilla!" admonished Owen. He turned his grin on the others. "Can't a man gas to the boss without all you yaps buttin' in?" ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer

... confidence—you know him for what he is, brother to you and the dust, a cosmic joke, a sport of chemistry, a garmented beast that arose out of the ruck of screaming beastliness by virtue and accident of two opposable great toes. He is brother as well to the gorilla and the chimpanzee. He thumps his chest in anger, and roars and quivers with cataleptic ferocity. He knows monstrous, atavistic promptings, and he is composed of all manner of shreds of abysmal ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London

... is, that she had in both the upper and lower jaw an irregular double set of teeth, one row being placed within the other, of which Dr. Purland took a cast. From the redundancy of the teeth her mouth projected, and her face had a gorilla-like appearance. These cases and those of the hairless dogs forcibly call to mind the fact, that the two orders of mammals—namely, the Edentata and Cetacea—which are the most abnormal in their dermal covering, are likewise ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin

... see that one of the brutes had seized their stalwart companion's rifle from him and with incredible strength had broken it in half as if it had been a wooden toy. The next minute Harry's rifle spoke and the gorilla that had just performed the miraculous feat of strength fell dead. With a shriek of rage the others turned to see whence ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton

... Dusseldorf in a cavern, we think it would not be difficult to find full as bad skulls on living shoulders, and equally bad forms in skeletons now walking about. To us they are no evidence that the first man was a gorilla or a chimpanzee, nor does his or Darwin's argument convince us that all vertebrates were once fishes. This question, however, is still mooted; and we have no objections that people should amuse themselves in thus tracing back ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... Saul fell to the earth. That Word, you scoff at it, you men, although you well know that all visible works, societies, monuments, deeds, passions, proceed from the breath of your own feeble word, and that without that word you would resemble the African gorilla, the nearest approach to man, the Negro. You believe firmly in Number and in Motion, a force and a result both inexplicable, incomprehensible, to the existence of which I may apply the logical dilemma which, as we have seen, prevents you from believing ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac

... selection caused some of these differences, why are they incompetent to effect changes in the direction of a diminution of the jaw or teeth? And if use and disuse are the sole modifying agents in the case of the human jaw, why should men have any more chin than a gorilla or ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball

... utter. If so crude a collection of sounds, amounting to less than a hundred words, if words they are, may be called a language, it may be admitted that the Professor has learned it, as his recent experiments show. What he has not proved is his assertion that he has actually conversed with a gorilla, or by signs, or grunts, or any means whatever obtained an insight, as he put it, into its mentality, or, as we should put it, its point of view. This Professor Beek claims to have done; and though he gives us a certain plausible corroboration ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany

... foolish as to try to evict us from this packet, then all I got to say is that they're triflin' with death." (Here Mr. Gibney thrust out his superb chest and thumped it with his horny fists, after the fashion of an enraged gorilla. This was sheer bluff, however, for while there was not a drop of craven blood in the Gibney veins, he realized that his footwork, in the event of battle, would be sadly deficient and he hesitated to wage a losing fight.) "I got my arms left, even if my feet ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne

... strong: and bid fair, ere the end of our commission, to develope into the ideal British sailor. A stranger, perhaps, would be struck with their youthful appearance; for strangers, especially if they be midland men, have an idea that a sailor is a hairy monster, but once removed from a gorilla or a baboon; and if we accept the relationship to these candated gentry, I don't think his ideas would be far out—say a dozen years since. But these terrible monsters are all now enjoying their well-earned pensions in rural ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith

... say!" McGinty held them to the light in his enormous hand, which was hairy as a gorilla's. "I can see no difference. Gar! you'll be a mighty useful brother, I'm thinking! We can do with a bad man or two among us, Friend McMurdo: for there are times when we have to take our own part. We'd soon be against the wall if we ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle

... hand, so that I carry his mark to this day; then, with his own hands, he took me by the throat, and I thought that my last moments were come. He squeezed so hard that I thought my windpipe must burst, thought my eyes must leave their sockets. It was the grip of a gorilla, and it was accompanied by a spate of curses and the grin of a devil incarnate. All my dreams of equal combat had not prepared me for superhuman power on his part, such utter impotence on mine. I tried to wrench myself from his ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung

... man left them; for, I suppose, their forebears—somewhere afar off in Asia, perhaps, in the dim, immemorial ages—had all passed through the various phases of the civilization of their time, and that they did not grow out of the tail of any gorilla. It is not for profane man to inquire what possible reason there could be for the perpetuation—let alone the creation—of such a useless, bootless race. There they are, occupiers of the soil for unknown centuries—before the white man ever saw their faces—many thousands of them still ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... the fauna of the eastern hemisphere than in that of the western, natural selection has accordingly resulted in the evolution of higher forms, and it is there that we find both extinct and surviving species of man's nearest collateral relatives, those tailless half-human apes, the gorilla, chimpanzee, orang, and gibbon. It is altogether probable that the people whom the Spaniards found in America came by migration from the Old World. But it is by no means probable that their migration occurred within so short ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske

... ugly old gorilla!" exclaimed the girl, unceremoniously and disdainfully. "I can get better-looking lovers than either a monkey or a Swab, I'd have you to ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg

... He was built like a steam caisson, or an oil-barrel, though without fat, with a neck that reminded you of a Miura bull with his head down just before the estoque; and when he neglected to button his undershirt—a not infrequent oversight—he displayed the hairy chest of a mammoth gorilla. ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck

... his human kingdom. In every case with him, as with us, the skull is more fully developed than the face. In the Neanderthal skull so often quoted as bestial, the cranial capacity is more than double that ever found in the largest gorilla." De Quatrefages: "Hommes Fossiles et ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac

... we kept on. Don't you know, how in the stories it is always in a terrific gale that the caged lion or gorilla or python breaks loose and terrorizes the ship? We don't sport a menagerie on the ——, but I did pick up the contents of the dry gun-cotton case, which had broken and spilt the torpedo detonators around on deck contiguous to the hot radiator! ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various

... his tone is pretty short on sweetness and light, and I do not see why Grogan, who looks something like a gorilla's mother-in-law, takes such guff from ...
— The Flying Cuspidors • V. R. Francis

... watches of the night a towel flung across the bedpost becomes a gorilla crouching to spring; a tree branch tapping at the window an armless hand, beckoning. In the watches of the night fear is a panther across the chest sucking the breath; but his eyes cannot bear the light ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... The gorilla is still the terror of some of the wild places of the earth; as he booms his way through the impenetrable forests, he sends forth his note of warning, beating his great hairy breast, and all living things flee before him. Fancy what the awful first man—his ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield

... greater power of handling things, have also more inquisitiveness and more capacity for sustained attention than any other mammals; and the higher apes are fertile in varied resources. The orang-outang and gorilla are for this reason dreaded by other animals, and roam the undisputed lords of their native forests. They have probably approached the critical point where variations in intelligence, always important, have come ...
— The Meaning of Infancy • John Fiske

... baptised," explained the Schoolmaster. "At least, that's one theory. According to another it's short for 'Missing Link.' Not that the boy's bad-looking; but did you happen to notice the length of his arms—like a gorilla's?" ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... curtain, striped gay as a calico shirt; The walls was jest like a museum, all statoos and flim-flam and gush And picters—good land! when I see 'em I jest had ter turn 'round and blush; And Hez! he looked like a gorilla,—a leetle round hat on his head, And hair that would stuff a big piller, and necktie blue, yeller, and red; I swan, he did look like a daisy! I tell yer, it went ter my heart, 'Cause, course I supposed he was crazy, until he ...
— Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse • Joseph C. Lincoln

... did not come again. He softly lit a cigarette And sought some other social set Where, in some other knots or rings, People were doing cultured things, —Miss Zwilt's Humane Vivarium —The little men that paint on gum —The exquisite Gorilla Girl.... He sometimes, in this giddy whirl (Not being really bad at heart), Remembered Shakespeare with a start— But not with that grand constancy Of Clement Shorter, Herbert Tree, Lord Rosebery and Comyns Carr And all the other names there are; Who stuck ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton

... Dupont was taller by half a head. The brutishness of his face was hidden under a coarse red beard; but the devil in him glowered from his deep-set, inhuman eyes; it walked in his gait, in the hulk of his great shoulders, in the gorilla-like slouch of his hips. His huge hands hung partly clenched at his sides. His breath was heavy with whisky that Layonne himself had smuggled in, and in ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood

... do?] "In their native state they (apes) form societies and obey a chief." [The old fallacy of metaphors adverted to in relation to ants and dogs.] Yet "no animal has ever learned to speak," "no chimpanzee or gorilla has ever been known to fashion any implement." [67] Their nearest approach to invention is in the building of huts or nests, in which they "are very inferior to most species of birds, to say nothing of insects." On the other hand, "as regards tool-making, no human race is known ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... great toe are opposable; but the foot is a true foot, and the hand a true hand, in anatomical structure. The face, hands, and feet have mainly lost the covering of hair. They have no tail, or rather its rudiments are concealed beneath the skin. These include the gibbon, the orang, the gorilla, ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler

... removed the ink, and when Loustalot moved to another ink-well, Farrel's hand closed over that. Helpless and desperate, Loustalot suddenly began to weep; uttering peculiar mewing cries, he clutched at Farrel with the fury of a gorilla. Don Mike merely dodged round the desk, and continued to dodge until out of the tail of his eye, he saw the sheriff enter the bank and stop at the cashier's desk. Loustalot, blinded with tears of rage, failed to see Don Nicolas; he had ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne

... long-nosed white gorilla," was Zulu's civil rejoinder, "you kin git another pair when nixt we goes aboard de mission-ship. Till den you kin grin ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne

... Maurice,—always Maurice,—and had her back completely turned; there was nothing visible but the outline of a tall slight figure. "Not ungraceful, certainly; but Mrs. Bellairs is graceful, and Miss Latour not bad; it must be walking so much. What a gorilla that fellow looks! The women here are ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill

... Bell. 'We'll be a day behind the fair at Liverpool. The Grotkau's got all the freight that might ha' been ours an' the Lammergeyer's.' McRimmon laughed an' chuckled—the pairfect eemage o' senile dementia. Ye ken his eyebrows wark up an' down like a gorilla's. ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling

... like that of a gorilla. Struggling up, he swept his right arm over and outward with singular twisting energy. A bayonet-thrust! And for him his left arm was still intact! A savage, unintelligible battle-cry, yet unmistakably German, ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey

... good. The difficulty for him is that he was born out of wedlock. This great disability could have been surmounted in America, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, or, in fact, anywhere but in England. The law of the natural child in this country would bring a blush to the cheek of a gorilla. But neither Church nor State will lift a finger to right ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts

... brilliant, iridescent, splendid? The beauty of it bids you bend to deity, otherwise it has no worth; it is a stimulus to religion, and that is all. So with the glowing incandescence of the stickleback and its polished scales of silver. What make you of the hoarse voice of the gorilla? Is not the dewlap of the ox inscrutable? the mane of the lion? the tusks of the boar? the musk-sack of the deer? In the amethyst and sapphire of the peacock's wing you find no rationality; to you it ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London



Words linked to "Gorilla" :   western lowland gorilla, silverback, Gorilla gorilla gorilla, genus Gorilla, great ape, mountain gorilla, eastern lowland gorilla, Gorilla gorilla, Gorilla gorilla beringei, pongid



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