"Giraffe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... turned to move on he caught a glimpse of a figure mounting the incline. The motion was as lithe as a young giraffe; the legs were as straight as spears and as supple as a kiboko; the moulded hips swayed rhythmically like a banana frond in the breeze; the fluted arch of her back swelled proudly upwards to the resilient shoulders; and ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... things she wished left in obscurity. Mrs. E., the little mother, as she is called by every one, was the second in command. A greater contrast to her cousin could not exist. Short, and rather stout, she trotted by the side of her companion, as the little hippopotamus by the side of the giraffe. Both their eyes were dark, but the mother's were soft, and the little mother's so brilliant when she fixed her eyes on you, you must tell what you thought, as they penetrated into the heart. Her broad forehead showed the prevalence of the intellectual powers, and the reliance on ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... astronomiae, added several new constellations to the list, viz. Canes venatici (the Greyhounds), Lacerta (the Lizard), Leo minor (Little Lion), Lynx, Sextans Uraniae, Scutum or Clypeus Sobieskii (the shield of Sobieski), Vulpecula et Anser (Fox and Goose), Cerberus, Camelopardus (Giraffe), and Monoceros (Unicorn); the last two were originally due to Jacobus Bartschius. In 1679 Augustine Royer introduced the most interesting of the constellations of the southern hemisphere, the Crux australis or ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... low down, somewhat to the west of north; his Queen (Cassiopeia) the Seated Lady, beside him (a and b mark the top rail of her chair's back); while above her lies the poor constellation Camelopardus, the Giraffe. ...
— Half-Hours with the Stars - A Plain and Easy Guide to the Knowledge of the Constellations • Richard A. Proctor
... a new character now arrived on the scene. A magnificent giraffe came along through the bushes, eating the tender shoots as it approached the spot.Pinocchio saw the giraffe and recognized it at once from a picture of one he had seen in school. The lion saw it also. What should he do? Continue to watch the marionette, or attack and ...
— Pinocchio in Africa • Cherubini
... 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 being conspicuously ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... my 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 ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... magnificent specimen of the giraffe, measuring upward of eighteen feet in height. I stood for nearly half an hour engrossed in the contemplation of his extreme beauty and gigantic proportions; and, if there had been no elephants, I could have ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... and to those in which allied forms lived, the change of structure being due to the effect of the conditions of life and of the actions of the organs. He did not specially consider the differences of closely allied species, but the peculiarities of marked types such as the long neck of the giraffe, the antlers of stags, the trunk of the elephant, and so on; but he considered that the action of external conditions was the true cause of evolution, and assumed that in course of time ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... he will not return. The first months comprise all the shocks of disappointment that are likely to disgust a new-comer. The sphere of opportunity opens slowly, but to a man of his abilities and culture—rare enough here—with the sureness of chemistry. The Giraffe entering Paris wore the label, "Eh bien, messieurs, il n'y a qu'une bete de plus!" And Oxonians are cheap in London; but here, the eternal economy of sending things where they are wanted makes a commanding claim. Do not suffer him to relapse into London. He had made himself ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 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 ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... rather a memorable one, as the first on which I saw and slew the lofty, graceful-looking giraffe or camelopard, with which, during many years of my life, I had longed to form an acquaintance. These gigantic and exquisitely beautiful animals, which are admirably formed by nature to adorn the fair forests that clothe the boundless plains of the interior, are widely distributed throughout the interior ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... country 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 ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... 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 Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... 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
... suddenly, and told her she looked awfully pretty, which cheered her very much. She was feeling rather tired. She had spent several hours in the nursery that day, pretending to be a baby giraffe with so much success that Archie had insisted upon countless encores, until, like all artists who have to repeat the same part too often, she felt the ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... (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 ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... 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
... 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 ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... we could scarcely see the grass. There were all sorts of them, springbucks in myriads, blesbok and quagga and wildebeeste in thousands, sable antelope, sassaby and hartebeeste in herds, eland, giraffe and koodoo in troops; while the forests were full of elephant and the streams of sea-cow. They are all gone now, the beautiful wild creatures; the guns of the white men have killed them out or driven them away, and I suppose that it is as well that they are gone, for while ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... 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 English industry was dependent for its existence on Scotch engineers, ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... represented. Michael Scott, his astrologer, translated Aristotle's "History of Animals." Frederick studied ornithology, on which he wrote a treatise, and possessed a menagerie of rare animals, including a giraffe, and other strange creatures. The popular dialect of Italy owed much to him, being elevated into a written language by his use of it in his love-sonnets. Of the poems written by himself, his son Enzio, and his friends, several have been preserved, while his chancellor, Peter ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... of the assembly; and Indra's longing was so intense 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, the crane, ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... of John Wesley Bass' natural gifts and attainments 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 in ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... little about him as he could, while in his earlier editions Erasmus Darwin and Buffon were not so much as named. Mr. Wallace, on the contrary, at once raised the Lamarckian spectre, and declared it exorcised. 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 neck than usual at once secured ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... soil erosion; deforestation; desertification; wildlife populations (such as elephant, hippopotamus, giraffe, and lion) threatened because of poaching ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... to 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 far up ...
— The Circus Boys Across The Continent • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... kongoni that has placed himself between the metals! The 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 ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... large 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 brown and the other gray because the first ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... camels. All these, from their practice of "chewing the cud," are called "ruminants," and they are multitudinous in kinds. The great plains of Southern Africa are the special home of most kinds of antelope, and the giraffe is exclusively African. Deer have their head-quarters in Asia, though they exist in South America as well ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... She looks at you as if you were a giraffe or something and she would like to take a pot at ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... the wild goats by the beard; Whistle to the cockatoos, and mock the hairy-faced baboon; Worship mighty Mumbo Jumbo in the mountains of the moon. I myself, in far Timbuctoo, leopard's blood shall daily quaff; Ride a tiger hunting, mounted on a thoroughbred giraffe." ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... closely related, but still with interbranching affinities, with all the other living and extinct mammalia? That without any apparent adequate cause their short necks should contain the same number of vertebrae with the giraffe; that their thick legs should be built on the same plan with those of the antelope, of the mouse, of the hand of the monkey, of the wing of the bat, and of the fin of the porpoise. That in each of these species the second bone of their leg should show clear traces of two bones having been soldered ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... that we have honoured so long in the arms of England. But we sincerely hope, that by the next arrival, it will not degenerate into a cow, or worse, a goat. But he tells us, that to our knowledge of the giraffe he has added considerably. He obtained in Nubia and Kordofan five specimens, two of which were males and three females. He regards the horns as constituting the principal generic character, they being formed by distinct bones, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... heavy, equally vast, equally peaceful. 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 vegetation without intruding on the supply of his fellows." ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... to kana, in Nongone to kaka, and in New Caledonia to ki. But by whatsoever sound or symbol, it was welcome to our ears after that long paddle in the rain. Once more we sat in the high seat of abundance until we regretted that we had been made unlike the image of the giraffe and the camel. ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... 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 domestic ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... and lowly organisms, and he accounted for the gradual differentiation of types by the hypothesis that they were the results of the inheritance of characteristics which had been acquired by continued use—as, for example, in the case of the giraffe who was supposed to have owed the length of its neck to the efforts of its ancestors to browse upon trees that were just beyond their reach. He maintained that the changes produced in the parents by temperature, nutrition, repeated use or disuse, were inherited so ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... original enterprise was the obstruction of the White Nile by the accumulation of matted vegetation, which impeded navigation, and actually closed the river. Upon arrival at Gondokoro, after the tedious process of cutting through 50 miles of swamp and vegetable matter, via the Bahr Giraffe, I had requested the Khedive to issue an order that the Governor of Khartoum should immediately commence the great work ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... especially shows 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 ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... have been worried in the same way yourselves," says Abbas Kahu, "I have replied to them, 'Is the Sahib a giraffe and I his keeper? Why, then, do you come to me? The Sahib has travelled a long way, and is stopping here to rest, not to make an ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... step back, 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 ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... appended, and their multiplied form only enhances this confusion. Beside which, these labels are of necessity frequently placed at such a height that, in order to decipher them, the head of the observer needs to be perched on a neck somewhat like the giraffe. So forcibly impressed am I with the soundness and value of this newly-devised plan, that I am led to predict that its adoption will sooner or later find favour among other kindred institutions even of a ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... 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 without ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... chase was similar to that employed in war. All the subjects of the chase were sculptured on the monuments with great spirit and fidelity, especially the stag, the ibex, the porcupine, the wolf, the hare, the lion, the fox, and the giraffe. The camel is not found among the Egyptian sculptures, nor the bear. Of the birds found in their sculptures were vultures, eagles, kites, hawks, owls, ravens, larks, swallows, turtle-doves, quails, ostriches, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... from the 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 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 barbarian' lower than the 'Christian cad,'—and that is low enough ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... framework of bones in the hand of a man, wing of a bat, fin of the 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 modifications. The similarity of pattern in the wing and in the leg of a bat, though used for ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... the geologists, there were great forests where Louisiana now is. Among these mighty trees roamed the glyptodont; the 16-foot armadillo with a tail like the morning-star of the old crusaders, monstrously magnified; the giraffe camel; the titanothere; the Columbian elephant, about the size of a trolley car and with 15-foot tusks; the giant sloth which could look into a second-story window; here the saber-toothed tiger fought with the megatherium; mighty rhinoceroses sloshed their clumsy way, and ...
— The Industrial Canal and Inner Harbor of New Orleans • Thomas Ewing Dabney
... 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 appearance, ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... invisible by his wonderful colour that, when he crouches in the bright sunlight amid the tall brown grass, it is almost impossible to see him. But the zebra and the giraffe are the kings of all camouflagers! So deceptive are the large blotch-spots of the giraffe and his weird head and horns, like scrubby limbs, that his concealment is perfect. Even the cleverest natives ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... 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 ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... have a shy,' squeaked George Cheek, backing his giraffe, as he had seen Mr. Sponge and ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... the 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 he can ...
— Animal Children - The Friends of the Forest and the Plain • Edith Brown Kirkwood
... 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 ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... in anxious haste; but he only saw what he had already too often seen in the daytime—the wild beasts of the wilderness roaming at liberty through the desert waste. Sometimes it was an ugly camel, then it was a long-necked and disproportioned giraffe, and then again a long-legged ostrich hastening away with its wings outspread. They all appeared to scorn him, and he had already taken his resolve to open his eyes no more, and to give himself up to his fate, without allowing these horrible ...
— The Two Captains • Friedrich de La Motte-Fouque
... crushed the dragon's fiery crest, And scaled the condor's dizzy nest; Till hardy sons and daughters fair Increased around his woodland lair. Then his victorious bow unstrung On the great bison's horn he hung. Giraffe and elk he left to hold The wilderness of boughs in peace, And trained his youth to pen the fold, To press the cream, and weave the fleece. As shrunk the streamlet in its bed, As black and scant the herbage grew, O'er endless plains his flocks he led Still to new brooks and postures new. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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 attests the former extension ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... collect plants and other objects of natural history. He penetrated a little further north than the Orange River, and into Kaffraria a good deal further east than Fish River. To him we owe the first notice of the giraffe; and his narrative is rich in important observations on the natural history, structure, and inhabitants ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... 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 ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... majesty itself, after making the experiment of yachts and frigates, quietly and comfortably return to its palace on board a steamer, we may be the less surprised at finding the Marquis of Londonderry and his family making their way across the Channel in the steamer Giraffe. Yet it is to be remarked, that though nothing can be more miscellaneous than the passengers, consisting of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, and Yankee; of Jews, Turks, and heretics; of tourists, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... variability in the number of the caudal vertebrae. In three specimens of an Arvicola he found the gall-bladder having a very different degree of development, and there is reason to believe it is sometimes absent. Professor Owen has shown that this is the case with the gall-bladder of the giraffe." ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... is real, life is earnest, and you have a bank roll of real profits a giraffe couldn't ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... 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 ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... 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 little bowers, sketched by a masterly hand, in the highly ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... 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 ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... Peter and a little boy named Boris. And Peter took him out for a walk and took him all around school. Then I took him out to my house and saw all my play things. And then I took him to Central Park and showed him sea lions and the giraffe and the elephant and I showed how they eat by their trunks. And he thought it was queer. And he said he was afraid of animals and so I took him home. I told him to tell his mother about it and his mother said, "You want ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... the mail. In Chicago they'd take out my phone if I squeaked it over the wires. Carlton is deeply interested in some mines out here—spinach mines I think. I made up my mind to something last night—I am determined to get him away from that carrotty giraffe whom he used to believe he loved. If in my convalescent state I am unable to arouse his sympathy, I'll relapse into white muslin emotions and thereby gain my end. I am made from dust and the slightest rustle from ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... 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 very tame plumage, and are much ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing. Let us point to heaven with tusks and 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 ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... still in silent ecstasy. He saw the heads of two 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 nervous laughs ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... before the fireplace. Kate would not go to bed. She determined to stay awake until Harry should come home. But the sofa-cushions became more and more pleasant, and very soon she was dreaming that Harry had shot a giraffe, and had skinned it, and had stuffed the skin full of sumac-leaves, and that he and she were pulling it through the woods, and that the legs caught in the trees and they could not get it along, and then she woke up. It was bright daylight. ...
— What Might Have Been Expected • Frank R. Stockton
... circus the show came unquestionably next. It made a processional entry into the town almost as impressive as the circus's, and the boys went out to meet it beyond the corporation line in the same way. It always had two elephants, at least, and four or five camels, and sometimes there was a giraffe. These headed the procession, the elephants in the very front, with their keepers at their heads, and then the camels led by halters dangling from their sneering lips and contemptuous noses. After these began to come the show-wagons, with pictures ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... returned from Kijabe with the extra wagonload of 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
... striatum), or, in the language of hunters, "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 of ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... two-ounce Manton rifle, and I singled out a fine dark-colored bull, who 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 ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 395, Saturday, October 24, 1829. • Various
... frequented by whalemen; and having now led for many years the bold life of the fishery in the ships of owners uncommonly heedful of what manner of men they shipped; daggoo retained all his barbaric virtues, and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp of six feet five in his socks. There was a corporeal humility in looking up at him; and a white man standing before him seemed a white flag come to beg truce of a fortress. Curious to tell, this imperial ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... of giraffe two days later, but so far off as to be beyond pursuit; but before evening, just as they were about to camp by some pools, they came ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... canopy, looking down upon the tens of thousands of people who were crowded in the seats of the Colosaeum, ornamented with all the spoils that the wealth of a world can give; I saw in the arena below animals of the most extraordinary kind, and which have rarely been seen living in modern Europe—the giraffe, the zebra, the rhinoceros, and the ostrich from the deserts of Africa beyond the Niger, the hippopotamus from the Upper Nile, and the royal tiger and the gnu from the banks of the Ganges. Looking over Rome, which, in its majesty of palaces ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... was before. When a man born 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, but it becomes a ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... saddle-cloths of 'em for the band of the forty-ninth Hussars. Your Majesty may have reckonized 'em; most people think it's giraffe skin, but it's ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... Rabbit, Beatrix Potter Lions and Tigers, Anonymous Apes and Monkeys, Anonymous The Hippopotamus and the Rhinoceros, Anonymous The Giraffe, Anonymous Parrots, Anonymous Rab and His Friends, John Brown, M.D. A Ride With a Mad Horse in a Freight-Car, W. H. H. Murray A-Hunting of the ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... from the ample 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 ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... you last evening at ten o'clock. There was a fire at my wood-seller's. The sky was rose color and the Seine the color of gooseberry sirup. I worked at the engine for three hours and I came home as worn out as the Turk with the giraffe. ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... produce no less abundant cotton. Westward the vast territories of Kordofan and Darfur afford grazing-grounds to a multitude of cattle, and give means of livelihood to great numbers of Baggara or cow-herd Arabs, who may also pursue with activity and stratagem the fleet giraffe and the still fleeter ostrich. To the south-east lies Bahr-el-Ghazal, a great tract of country occupied by dense woods and plentifully watered. Further south and nearer the Equator the forests and marshes become exuberant with tropical ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... in power of flight, and this gain consisted first in rising from the toes, lifting the heels completely off the ground. At the same time the leg and foot were gradually lengthened. Doubtless in this way the fleet animals, like the deer, the horse and the giraffe, first came by their long legs. Constant elimination of the short-legged ones, by the pursuing enemy, resulted in the selection of the long-limbed ones for breeding purposes, and hence to the ultimate elongation of the ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... lions 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 ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... 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 ...
— The Last of the Peterkins - With Others of Their Kin • Lucretia P. Hale
... Mak uttered an exclamation, and pointed towards a particular spot in the plain before us, where, close by a clump of trees, we saw the graceful head and neck and part of the shoulders of a giraffe. We were naturally much excited at the sight, this being the first we had fallen ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... only seven years, you are old enough to read a boys' book about wild animals. Lions will catch and eat nearly all beasts that come in their way. They will even overpower a giraffe or a buffalo. The elephant and rhinoceros are almost the only quadrupeds a ...
— Harper's Young People, January 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... characters. It is apt to seem obvious to the plain man that the effects of 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 ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... giraffe is here mal-place: it is, I repeat, one of the most timid of the antelope tribe. Nothing can be more graceful than this huge game as it stands under a tree extending its long and slender neck to the foliage above it; but when in flight all the limbs seem loose and the head is carried ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... eyes, filled with a great hunger for merry-go-rounds, she laughed softly and told Mr. Jerry that, of course, she wouldn't take a dare, she never had and she never would, and she thought she'd choose the giraffe because his long neck gave a rider so much to ...
— Mary Rose of Mifflin • Frances R. Sterrett
... said the tall, angular fellow who seemed to own the queer name of Giraffe, though his long neck plainly proved why it had been given to him by his mates. "But don't it beat the Dutch how many times Doe Hobbs has had to give up a jolly trip, and hurry back home, just when the fun ...
— The, Boy Scouts on Sturgeon Island - or Marooned Among the Game-fish Poachers • Herbert Carter
... than any other King upon earth; 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 ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... ring-master facing a line of animals standing in a straight line reaching from one side of the ring to the other. In the middle stood the elephant, with the summer house, as Billy called it, on his back; next him stood a camel; next the camel a giraffe; next the giraffe a horse; next the horse, a zebra, and last a little Shetland pony. On the other side of the elephant were more animals standing ...
— Billy Whiskers - The Autobiography of a Goat • Frances Trego Montgomery
... entered the room. One was the long Mr Pilkington. The other, who looked shorter and stouter than he really was beside his giraffe-like companion, was a thickset, fleshy man in the early thirties with a blond, clean-shaven, double-chinned face. He had smooth yellow hair, an unwholesome complexion, and light green eyes, set close together. From the edge of the semi-circle about the piano, he glared menacingly over the ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... 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 ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis
... the force of Mivart's objection to the theory of production of the long neck of the giraffe (suggested in my first Essay), and which C. Wright seems to admit, while his "watch-tower" theory seems to me more difficult and unlikely as a means of origin. The argument, "Why haven't other allied animals been modified in the same way?" seems to me the weakest of the weak. ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... if you rode a giraffe, Or mounted the back of an ox; It's nobody's habit to ride on a rabbit, Or try to bestraddle a fox. But as for a Camel, he's Ridden by families— Any load ...
— The Best Nonsense Verses • Various
... and the huge Jeekie blundered along after him, the paraphernalia with which he was hung about rattling like the hoofs of a galloping giraffe. Nor for all his load did he ever turn a hair. Whether it were fear within or a desire to save his master, or a belief in the virtues of Little Bonsa, or that his foot was, as it were, once more upon his native heath, the fact remained that notwithstanding ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... but, like that distinguished writer, he is obliged to take refuge behind the deficiency of the geological record, and to suppose facts and proofs may hereafter be discovered, when few are now known to favor the new hypothesis. We can see no more reason why a giraffe should have had a long neck, because he wished to crop the leaves of tall trees, than that mankind should have become winged, because in all times both children and men have wished to fly. Nor do we ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... 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 of science, "Your elephant is an impossible monster, contrary to the laws of comparative ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... enormous size, and some were by far the largest of all four-footed animals, exceeded in bulk only by the modern whales. In contrast to the carnivorous dinosaurs these are quadrupedal, with very small head, blunt teeth, long giraffe-like neck, elephantine body and limbs, long massive tail prolonged at the tip into a whip-lash as in the lizards. Like the elephant they have five short toes on each foot, probably buried in life in a large soft pad, but the inner digits bear large claws, blunt like those of ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew
... It presupposes that the vast majority of forms that survive accidental destruction, succumb in the second struggle for life in which the determining factor is some slight individual variation, e.g., a little longer neck in the case of the giraffe, or a wing shorter than usual in the case of an insect on an island. The whole theory of struggle, as formulated by Darwin, is, therefore, a violent assumption. Men of science now recognize that "egoism and struggle ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert |
