212 WILD ANIMALS. 



CHAPTER XIV. 



THE GIEAFFE {CAMELOPARBUS GIRAFFA). 



Giraffes, wliicli are certainly the most ornamental animals of 

 the African deserts, must, from their extraordinary height and 

 peculiar structure, cause astonishment to any person who sees 

 them for the first time. One has only to look at them to under- 

 stand why the descriptions originally given of these creatures by 

 those travellers in olden times who had seen them during their 

 peregrinations were received with incredulity and ridicule. Cer- 

 tainly, as was their wont, they were not content to give a truth- 

 ful narration of facts, but must furnish exaggerated accounts 

 even of these animals, which certainly d6 not require any mag- 

 nifying to make them marvellous enough. John Leo, in ' his 

 " Ninth Booke of the Historie of Africa,"^ states : "Hares, goats, 

 harts, boars, elephants, camells, buffals, lions, panthers, tigres, 

 rhinoceroses, and other creatures are there seen, and one so huge 

 that a man sitting on horsebacke may pass upright under his 

 belly ; his shape is like a camell, but his nature divers, feeding on 

 leaves, which he reacheth from the tops of trees with his necke 

 stretched forth," and in the margin it is stated " This seemeth to 

 be the camelopardalis," In the index of the same book a page 

 reference is given thus : " GamelopardaliSi a huge wilde beast." 

 It would have to be a very little man on a Very little horse to 

 pass upright under a giraffes and Leo's astonishment on seeing 

 the animal must have caused the magnified impression he carried 

 away with him. Nevertheless, although the elephants are the 

 largest animals on the face of the globe, the giraffes are un- 



' " Purchas, his Pilgrimes." 1625. 



