ie ee 
XVIII. Notes on the Anatomy of the Nubian Giraffe. By Ricuarv Owen, Esq., F.R.S., 
§c., Hunterian Professor of Anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons. 
Communicated January 23rd, 1838. 
AFTER the lapse of many centuries the civilized nations of Europe begin again to be 
familiar with living specimens of the rarer animals from the remote regions of the globe ; 
and as a consequence naturally flowing from the great moral revolution which has 
been effected during that interval, they can plead higher and better motives for such 
collections than those which stimulated the citizens of ancient Rome to excel in the 
exhibitions of the circus. But the improvement in our tastes and wants, in reference 
to collections of living animals, has not hitherto produced a corresponding activity in 
their gratification: nor, indeed, does the service of modern zoological science require 
the extraordinary energies and pecuniary expenditure which enabled a Roman dictator 
or emperor to gratify the vitiated desires of an enslaved and cruel people with spectacles 
of the slaughter of Lions, Bears, Elephants, Dromedaries, and Ostriches, by hundreds 
ata time. It is the variety and not the number of rare animals which we are now 
concerned in procuring ; but even in this respect much remains to be done before we 
shall have rivalled the ancients as importers of rare species ; and it is somewhat morti- 
fying to reflect that the living Hippopotamus and the two-horned Rhinoceros have 
hitherto been witnessed in Europe, only in the degrading sports of a Roman amphi- 
theatre, and that science has profited nothing by their exhibition. 
No person who has perused the “‘ Historia Animalium” of Aristotle but must feel con- 
vinced that, if the Grecian naturalist had enjoyed opportunities like those afforded to 
the Roman philosophers of observing the rare animals which were repeatedly exhibited 
alive, and slain in the public games in their times, he would have left to posterity the 
same accurate and philosophical record of their characteristic forms and qualities as of 
the animals whose descriptions are given in the wonderful treatise above mentioned. 
The Hippopotamus was known to Aristotle only through the medium of a vague de- 
scription by Herodotus; the two-horned Rhinoceros and the Giraffe he had neither 
_ seen nor heard of; yet at Rome, besides the Hippopotamus and Rhinoceros, the 
Giraffe’ was more than once exhibited. The third Gordian showed ten living Giraffes, 
which it is conjectured were afterwards slaughtered at the millenarian games”. But our 
' “ Nabun 4&thiopes vocant, collo similem equo, pedibus et cruribus bovi, camelo capite, albis maculis rutilum 
colorem distinguentibus, unde appellata Camelopardalis. Dictatoris Cesaris Circensibus ludis primum yisa 
Rome.” C. Plinii Hist. Nat. liber viii. 
* «Dio decem Camelopardales narrat a Gordiano exhibitas, quas mox Roma interfectas in millenariis ludis, 
Philippo imperante, speculata est.” Cuvier’s Pliny, vol. i. p. 392. nota 4. 
