Phil Robinson

“ The great carnivora never troubled their heads about such a preposterous victim, and the nations of the deer kind, couching by day in the forest depths and feeding by night in the open plain, saw nothing of the bulky rhinoceros. He lived therefore in virtual solitude, — for water-fowl and weasels were hardly worth calling companions, — and was indeed so vigilant in guarding his concealment that he remained a secret for ages.
The rhinoceros, therefore, figures nowhere in folk-lore, and neither fairy tale nor fable has anything to tell us of it. Art owes little to it, and commerce nothing. ”

“ It is difficult to believe that the giraffe finds much fun in life; for, after all, most of the fun of the animal world goes on upon the ground. Of course, if the giraffe thinks itself a bird, it may be contented enough all by itself in the air, but its aspect is one of subdued melancholy, such as appertains to all anomalous positions, whether those of queen-dowagers or dodos. ”

“ The cowl at the top outside would keep the rain off its head, and, as the wind blew it round and round, the giraffe, from its sweep’s eminence, would be gratified by a gyroscopic view of the surrounding country. It is the only animal that lives on the earth and never thinks about the ground it walks on. ”

“ Now, if all were impartially adorned in colors, all would share more largely in public sympathy; for just as no one now would think of shooting the gold and silver pheasants, no one then would think of prodding a golden rhinoceros with his umbrella, or betraying the confidence of a silver hippopotamus with empty paper-bags or the innutritions pebble. ”

“ The world, however, owes both the hippopotamus and the rhinoceros a grudge, inasmuch as neither contributes to human welfare. That their hides make good leather is no adequate justification for such huge entities, and the fact of their teeth and horns being useful for paper-knives and walking-sticks hardly authorizes two prodigious creatures to occupy so much terrestrial space. It is centuries ago since the elephant made good its claim to be considered a friend and benefactor of the human race, but neither of its great companions has ever bestirred itself in the service of men. ”

“ But it is such a creature that if it were to show itself now in the swamps of Assam or on the plains of Central Africa, it would terrify off its path all the species of the present day, whether one-horned or two-horned, and make no more of an obstinate elephant than an avalanche does of a goatherd’s hut that happens to stand in the line of its advance. ”

“ For ever so many centuries nobody with any pretensions to intelligence would believe that such a creature as the giraffe existed. It was its neck that did it, and a man who persisted in believing in that part of its body might have been sent to the stake for it. ”

“ With the hippopotamus the case is somewhat different, for the apparently defenceless nature of the river-horse enlists public sympathy on his behalf, while the very absurdity of his appearance disarms ill-natured criticism. The horn of the rhinoceros is its ruin, for the popular esteem will never be extended to a creature that carries about on the tip of his nose such a formidable implement of offence. The hippopotamus, fortunately for itself, is unarmed, so that a certain compassionate regard is not considered out of place. ”

“ The leviathans and the behemoths of the time — creatures of unlimited space and time and food — prowled about, without any horizon to their migrations, cropping the herbage as they went and dying where they happened to be standing last. ”

“ That he is very ugly and looks very wicked is the burden of all criticism, and it is a wonder that under such perpetual provocation to do so he does not grow uglier and look wickeder than he is. No ordinary man could go on being called “a hideous brute” for any great number of years without assuming a truculent and unlovable aspect; and it would not, therefore, be much matter for surprise if the rhinoceros, although such conduct were altogether foreign to his character and even distasteful to his feelings, should develop a taste for human flesh. ”

“ For birds, again, we need go no farther — for we should certainly fare no better — than our own colony of New Zealand, which monopolizes the wonders of the bird paradise, where a score of gigantic feathered things, as big as camels, had the islands all to themselves, feeding to their hearts’ content on the nutritious fern-roots. ”

“ A rhinoceros, therefore, when he stands at the bars with his mouth open in expectation of the donation which is seldom thrown in, hears much that must embitter his hours of solitary reflection. The remarks of visitors are never relieved by any reference to his sagacity or docility, as in the case of the elephant; nor does any appreciation of usefulness to man temper the severity of their judgments upon him. ”

“ In the wild state, whether he be the African species or the Asiatic, the rhinoceros is a lazy, quiet-loving beast, passing his days in slumber in some secluded swamp of reed-bed, and coming out at night to browse along the wild pastures that offer themselves on forest edges or the water-side. ”

“ Next door, so to speak, to the giraffes are the zebras, and, passing from one to the other, the thought occurs how pleasantly art might be made to supplement nature in the coloring of animals, or how agreeable it would have been if in the first instance Nature herself had painted a few more of the larger animals as she has decorated these two comrades of the African wilderness. ”

“ The carnivora advantage by the accident of their painted skins; but the zebra and the giraffe need no excusings for crime, for they commit none. They are innocent and beautiful at one and the same time. The hippopotamus, poor monster! is only innocent, and the rhinoceros is neither, and each, therefore, receives from the public its proportion of depreciative comment ”

“ But captivity, if it robs him of freedom, injures the rhinoceros less than most of the beasts of the field, for he was never given to much exercise, and his life was an indolent one. Now and again, it is true, the hunters found him out, and awakened him to an unusual vivacity, and on such occasions he developed a nimbleness of limb and ferocity of temper that might hardly have been expected of so bulky and retiring an individual. ”

“ It is true that the extinct kangaroo, as big as a hippopotamus in the body, had an enemy in the pouched lion; but there were twenty kinds of lesser kangaroos which the carnivorous beast could attack first; so the largest lived on in peace and flourished, growing more and more huge, until at last Man appeared in a spectral sort of way upon the scene, and annihilated the genus. ”

“ Progress will order them to move on, and so by their families and parishes they will have to go, — the sulky leopard-folk and solemn lemurs, troops of squirrel and wild-cat, and the weasels by their tribes. Diligent men will mow down the cane-beds that have housed centuries of crocodiles, and the exquisite islands will be cleared of jungle that human beings may take possession of the ancestral domains of the lizard kinds. Wildernesses of snakes will have to go, and out of the giant reeds flocks of great water-fowl will rush startled from their hiding-places. ”

“ From my speaking of the elephant as a Mammoth, of the rhinoceros as a Titan, and the hippopotamus as Behemoth, you might fairly charge me, reader, with having forgotten that these animals, big as we think them, are really after all only the pygmies of their species. ”

“ Advancing to where the older timber grows and the nobler plains are spread, the colonist will disturb the bulky rhinoceros and the lordly elephant; and in the creeks of river and lake that will come under man’s dominion the hippopotamus will find its right of place challenged. ”

“ He was a feeble creature at first, and his best accomplishments were those that taught him how to escape his many foes, for our ancestors had but little time for the cultivation of other arts and sciences when the best part of their days and nights had to be spent in scrambling up trees out of the reach of prowling carnivora, and running away from ill-tempered things of the rhinoceros and elephant kind. ”

“ But I had not really forgotten it, for before me lies a paragraph announcing the discovery, in Siberia, of one of those colossal animals, which nature is very fond of dropping in, in a casual way, every now and then, just to keep our pride down and to remind us, the creatures of a degenerate growth, what winter meant in the years gone by and what kind of person an inhabitant of the earth then was. ”

“ Sometimes, it is true, the giraffe stoops to mammalian levels; but there is something so lofty even in its condescension that the very act of bending enhances the haughtiness of its erect posture, and suggests that it does it from policy. To be always keeping state, and forever in the clouds, might make shorter animals accuse it of acting superciliously ”

“ On the contrary, the giraffe, remarking that it has been provided by nature with a long and pliable neck, terminating in a very solid head, uses the upper half of itself like a flail, and, swinging its neck round and round in a way that does immense credit to its organization, brings its head down at each swing with a thump on its adversary The other combatant is equally sagacious, and adopts precisely the same tactics ”

“ The time, therefore, it may be, is not far distant when the present waste of traction power will cease, and the two monsters, hitherto useless, be trained to drag our caravans across the plains and our barges down the rivers of the Dark Continent. ”

“ For reptiles, our own colonies in Africa supply individuals worthy in every way to have been the contemporaries of these giants. Huge herbivorous dragons — two-tusked reptiles with the skulls of crocodiles — grazed along the rich pastures of the antediluvian Africa ”

“ Its skin, though ludicrous, looks smooth and tight, suggesting vulnerability, or even a tendency to burst on any occasion of violent impact with a foreign body, while the rhinoceros wears an ill-fitting suit of impenetrable leather, which hangs so easily upon its limbs as to lead the spectators to suppose the brute had deliberately put it on as a kind of overcoat for defence against any possible assailants. ”

“ Spiders, as a rule, build their cobwebs in the cornices, in order to be out of harm’s way; but in the giraffes’ house, if they do not wish to be perpetually molested by sniffing, they have to build in the angles of the floor ”

“ Unassisted by associations, and possessing neither a literature nor a place in the fauna of fancy the monstrous thing relies for sympathy and regard simply upon its merits, and these have sadly failed to ingratiate it. ”

“ THE ELEPHANT’S FELLOW-COUNTRYMEN.
The Rhinoceros a Victim of Ill-Natured Personality. — In the Glacial Period. — The Hippopotamus. — Popular Sympathy with it. — Behemoth a Useless Person. — Extinct Monsters and the World they Lived in. — The Impossible Giraffe. — Its Intelligent use of its Head as a Hammer. — The Advantages and Disadvantages of so much Neck. — Its High Living. — The Zebra. — Nature’s Parsimony in the matter of Paint on the Skins of Animals. — Some Suggestions towards more Gayety.
ELEPHANTS, there is no doubt, are favorites with the public, and they merit their popularity. ”

“ But the adult birds had no cause for fear even from such an eagle as this; and so the geese grew so big that they could not fly and gradually dispensed with wings, and the coots became so prodigious that they, too, gave up flying as a troublesome and unnecessary method of locomotion ”