THE GIRAFFE. O 



which was living at Florence in the year 1486. " It is/' 

 says he, " in the meridional part, of Ethiopia that the carae- 

 lopardalis, which the Arabs call Siraf, is found. Its hinder 

 part is so low compared to the front, that it seems as if it 

 were sitting. The inhabitants of Florence have seen this 

 giraffe, without any effort, to run with so much speed as to 

 outstrip the cavaliers, even when they gave the rein and spur 

 to their steeds." In another place he adds, "What is very 

 surprising, is, that Pliny, Solin, Strabo, Albertus Magnus, 

 Diodorus, Varro, and other writers, were ignorant that this 

 animal had horns ; which leads me to conjecture that the one 

 which was seen for the first time at Rome under the dicta- 

 torship of Julius Caesar, had lost its horns, as well as the one 

 which appertained to the Emperor Frederic in the time of 

 Albertus Magnus." Lastly, Constanzio observes : "When 

 the camelopardalis walks, the left foot does not follow the 

 right fore- foot; on the contrary, the two right feet move 

 together, then the two left." 



It has, however, been denied that the giraffe exhibits this 

 ambling gait. Mr. Davis the animal painter, who executed 

 several portraits of the living giraffe for His late Majesty, 

 observes : " I doubt whether the giraffe does amble, as as- 

 serted by M. Geoffroy St. Hilaire. Its walk is fast, from 

 the length of its limbs, but extremely awkward ; its gallop 

 is a succession of jumps, and I see no reason why it should 

 not continue long, if we judge by analogy with the form of 

 some horses and dogs that have narrow stomachs: there may 

 be a sufficient space for the play of lungs in depth, if not pos- 

 sessed in breadth. When I say the walk is awkward, perhaps 

 this specimen is hardly a fair one to form such an opinion 

 generally, for its growth has been very rapid, and its limbs are 

 deformed by the treatment it experienced when in the hands 

 of the Arabs in its overland journey from Sennaar to Cairo. It 

 was occasionally confined on the back of a camel; and when 

 they huddled it together for that purpose, they were not nice 

 in the choice of cords, or the mode of applying them ; it bears 

 the marks of what it must have suffered in this way.*" 



Our own observations on the giraffe now living in the 

 Garden of Plants in Paris, which exhibits none of the untoward 

 symptoms mentioned by Mr. Davis, go very much to support 

 the ancient and generally received opinions on this subject. In 

 starting, we observed that it invariably moved first a fore- 

 foot, then the hind-foot of the opposite side ; this action was 

 almost immediately followed by throwing forward the fore- 

 foot of the same side ; then the hind-foot of the opposite side 



* Literary Gazette, Dec. 1, 1827. 



