230 ADVENTURES IN SOUTH AFRICA 



Although we had now been traveling many days 

 through the country of the giraffe, and had marched 



panions, generally attaining to a height of upward of eighteen feet. 

 The females are of lower stature and more delicately formed than the 

 vnJles, their height averaging from sixteen to seventeen feet. Some 

 writers have discovered ugliness and a want of grace in the giraffe, but 

 I consider that he is one of the most strikingly beautiful animals in the 

 creation ; and when a herd of them is seen scattered through a grove 

 of the picturesque parasol-topped acacias which adorn their native 

 plains, and on whose uppermost shoots they are enabled to browse by 

 the colossal height with which nature has so admirably endowed them, 

 he must indeed be slow of conception who fails to discover both grace 

 and dignity in all their movements. There can be no doubt that every 

 animal is seen to the greatest advantage in the haunts which nature 

 destined him to adorn, and among the various living creatures which 

 beautify this fair creation I have often traced a remarkable resem- 

 blance between the animal and the general appearance of the locality 

 in which it is fomid. This I first remarked at an early period of my 

 life, when entomology occupied a part of my attention. No person fol- 

 lowing this interesting pursuit can fail to observe the extraordinaiy 

 likeness which insects bear to the various abodes in which they are 

 met with. Thus, among the long green grass we find a variety of long 

 green insects, whose legs and antennae so resemble the shoots emana- 

 ting from the stalks of the grass that it requires a practiced eye to dis- 

 tinguisii them. Throughout sandy districts varieties of insects are met 

 with of a color similar to the sand which they inhabit. Among the 

 green leaves of the various trees of the forest innumerable leaf-colored 

 insects are to be found ; while, closely adhering to the rough gray bark 

 of these forest-trees, w^e observe beautifully-colored gray-looking moths 

 of various patterns, yet altogether so resembling the bark as to be invis- 

 ible to the passing observer. In like manner, among quadrupeds I have 

 traced a corresponding analogy, for, even in the case of the stupendous 

 elephant, the ashy color of his hide so corresponds with the general ap- 

 pearance of the gray thorny jungles which he frequents throughout the 

 day, that a person unaccustomed to hunting elephants, standing on a 

 commanding situaftion, might look down upon a herd and fail to detect 

 their presence. And further, in the case of the giraffe, which is inva- 

 riably met with among venerable forests, where innumerable blasted 

 and weather-beaten trunks and stems occur, I have repeatedly been iu 

 doubt as to the presence of a troop of them until I had recourse to my 

 spy-glass; and on referring the case to my savage attendants, I liavo 

 known even their optics to fail, at one time mistaking these dilapidated 

 trunks for camelopards, and again confounding real camelopards with 

 these a^ed veterans of the forest. 



