Trunk (animal)

“ This trunk, composed of membranes, nerves, and muscles, is, at the same time, a member capable of motion, and an organ of sentiment. The animal can not only move and bend it, but he can shorten, lengthen, and turn it all ways. The extremity of the trunk is terminated by a protuberance, which projects on the upper part like a finger, by which the elephant does the same as we do with our fingers; he picks up from the ground the smallest pieces of money ”

“ When elephants had trunks less than a foot long, the chance of getting trunks more than one foot long was in proportion to the length of trunks already present and to the number of individuals; but increment in trunk length is no more likely to occur from an animal having a trunk more than one foot long than from an animal with a shorter trunk. ”

“ These are chiefly leeches, worms, and aquatic mollusca and larvæ of insects, but in all probability no small aquatic animal would come greatly amiss. The curious movable trunk with which the animal is endowed is brought actively into play during the search for provisions. It is turned and twisted in various directions, touching the various objects that come in the way, and is used to feel about for prey, which it is said to seize and convey to the neighbouring mouth after the same fashion as the trunk of an elephant. ”

“ There are other things kept in the trunk as well as the nuts, and if any person goes to the trunk for anything he becomes furiously angry. Indeed nothing makes him so angry as people opening the trunk, and this is not because he wants nuts out of it, for he always has more than he can eat beside him, and generally refuses to take any that are offered to him. Well, to-day, as soon as the breaking of his chain enabled him to get to the trunk, he began picking at the lock with his fingers. ”

“ In general, every insect possesses 2 pairs of wings; the trunk in the adult animal is usually composed of 3 chief parts—the head, thorax, and abdomen. The trunk of an insect may also be described as consisting of 13 segments, of which 1 constitutes the head, 3 constitute the thorax, and 9 the abdomen. ”

“ But you must not think that an elephant actually drinks through his trunk! He does not! The elephant's trunk is really his nose, though it is a very long nose. What he does is to dip the trunk into the stream and suck in the water about halfway up the trunk ”

“ Their snout or trunk is very long, and by means of it they convey food and drink to their mouths, so that the trunk may be called the hand of the elephant. The mouth is under the trunk, and is much like the mouth of a sow. ”

“ As hollow as a garden hose, that trunk is made up of forty thousand muscles laid length-wise, cross-wise and on the bias, in a net-work that gives it great strength and variety of motion. With its trunk the elephant can pick up a peanut, pet its baby, pull a small tree up by the roots, give itself a shower or dust bath, break off a leafy branch and shoo away the flies, slapa saucy tiger senseless, and bellow like the bass horn in a brass band. ”

“ Their immense weight acting on their broad feet, bordered by sharp horny toes, cuts away the side of the hill at every stride and forms a level step; thus they are enabled to skirt the sides of precipitous hills and banks with comparative case. The trunk is the wonderful monitor of all danger to an elephant, from whatever cause it may proceed. ”

“ The second one had been coming down the trunk of the same tree, spiraling the trunk, the way squirrels do, stopping at frequent intervals and studying their surroundings with their bright beebees of eyes, looking right at you sometimes but never seeing you unless you moved. ”

“ Nor must we here omit that great variety of arms with which nature has differently fortified the bodies of several kind of animals, such as claws, hoofs, and horns, teeth, and tusks, a tail, a sting, a trunk, or a proboscis. ”

“ The transformation from that silent, rakish, slinking stern to high-thrown head, gleaming tusks and whirling trunk, now advancing directly upon you, is a nerve test of the highest order. The noise is terrific. With his trunk he lashes the bushes. His great sides crash the trees down in [4] every direction, dragging with them in their fall innumerable creepers. The whole forest is in an uproar. Much of this clatter the experienced hunter writes off as bluff, for after a short, sharp rush of this sort he will often come to a dead stop and listen intently. ”

“ The trunk is relatively long and compressed, and the tail when long is never truly prehensile. Of the limbs, the posterior are longer than the anterior, and all have five digits, each bearing a flat nail except the second toe, which has invariably a long pointed claw, their tips ending in prominent discoidal tactile pads. ”

“ In woods, one or two trunks, with the flowery ground below, are at once the richest and easiest kind of study: a not very thick trunk, say nine inches or a foot in diameter, with ivy running up it sparingly, is an easy, and always a rewarding subject. ”

“ You feel transported into some unheard-of, impossible, but still real world. The trunks of the trees look like phantoms, the men resemble hyenas, owls, cats, asses, or hippopotamuses; their nails may be talons, their shoes covered with bows may conceal cloven feet; that young cavalier may be some old corpse, and his trunk hose, ornamented with ribbons, envelop perhaps a fleshless thigh-bone and two shrunk legs ”

“ A tree is the usual spot selected for this purpose, and the Leopard, after climbing the trunk by means of its curved talons, settles itself in the fork of the branches, so that its body is hidden by the boughs, and only its head is shown between them. ”

“ When passing from one tree to another on wing, they also fly in a straight line, until within a few yards of the spot on which they intend to alight, when they suddenly raise themselves a few feet, and fasten themselves to the bark of the trunk by their claws and tail. If they intend to settle on a branch, which they as frequently do, they do not previously rise ”

“ Far more usually, however, he flies direct to the trunk, on whose perpendicular side he alights as suddenly as if he had been stuck there, and either commences rapping with his powerful beak, or hops upward till he finds a more promising scene of operations. ”

“ And he saw the great tree trunk lying twenty feet below him, wedged in between the young pines.
He was surrounded by broken fragments of limbs, and it was evident that the tree had not struck him a full blow. The limbs had protected him to some extent. No man is of such mold as to be crushed under the solid weight of the trunk and live to remember it. ”

“ Half-way up the trunk of a rugged elm or oak he will observe a small portion of bark, as it were, in motion; the motion, and not the colour, betrays the presence of a small brown bird, which is working its way by a succession of irregular starts up the trunk. ”

“ The adaptation of the trunk to many purposes is very interesting. I had an elephant who would eat every particle of rice in a round bamboo basket by sucking it up the trunk and then blowing it into its mouth. ”

“ As to its standing in the trunk, ’tis alwayes betwixt the trunk or Elder Branch, and the Basis of the Stalk of the Leaf; whereby it is not only guarded from the Injuries of any contingent Violence, but also from the more piercing assaults of the Cold, so long till in time ’tis grown, as larger, so more hardy. ”

“ Contrary to what might be expected, the dense wood of the tree decays, and suffers from the ravages of insects, more swiftly than the bark. And the traveller, setting his foot on a prostrate trunk, finds that it is a mere shell, which breaks under his weight, and lands his foot amidst the insects, or the reptiles, which have sought food or refuge within. ”

“ A vast amount of work has yet to be done, in investigating the pterylosis of the trunk, for the sake of the evidence it will unquestionably furnish as to the relationship of forms whose affinities can at the present be no more than guessed at. ”

“ Specimens of these creatures have been found over eighty feet long, with a skull more than a yard long, and the jaws set with strong, cone-shaped teeth. The trunk of this reptile was ribbed like that of a snake, and it possessed two pairs of webbed feet, or paddles, to guide its course in the water. On land it must have moved with the wave-like motions of a serpent. It was covered with small scales, and was driven through the water by strokes of its mighty tail.
No animals perhaps are of more interest among the vanished forms than the ancestors of the horse. ”

“ The trunk of the elephant, the neck of the giraffe, the limbs of the horse or deer, the canines of the satire-toothed tiger, the wings of the bat, the colouring of the tiger, the horns of the deer, are so many examples in the mammal world alone. ”

“ As the trunk, however, assumes an oblique position when the insect wishes to swim, one can then imagine the driving up of the water as being divided into two forces, one of which drives the body forward in a horizontal direction, while the other, that is, the vertical component, is supplied by the moving of the oars. ”

“ As the deer or antelope treads on the snare, the foot passes easily through the elastic spikes, but, when the foot is raised, the spikes run into the joint and hold the hoop upon the limb. Terrified by the check and the sudden pang, the animal tries to run away, but, by the united influence of sharp spikes and the heavy log, it is soon forced to halt, and so becomes an easy prey to its pursuers. ”

“ The upright trunk thickens just above the ground, and thins in a remarkable manner to about half its height, then begins to bulge out, then again diminishes, and swells out once more just under the crown. ”

“ Spring brings much activity for a nesting site must be found, then the labor of digging a cavity from 8 to 12 inches deep in a post, dead limb or tree trunk. The home may be near the ground or high in some tree and often is found with the entrance beneath a limb. ”

“ Sometimes a limb is chosen, sometimes an upright trunk, and the nest may be from two feet to one hundred [22] feet from the ground, though most frequently it will be found not less than ten nor more than thirty feet up. ”

“ In the latter case he twines his trunk around the branch, and if he is pulling it down from the tree he raises himself on his hind legs, and lets his weight hang by his trunk. In this way he can bring down a good-sized branch without much trouble; and as he feeds on the leaves and small limbs in the forest where he lives, his power is very useful to him. ”

“ The trunk is longer and very ponderous, possessing immense strength, as if to compensate the animals for the want of the formidable tusks possessed by the Goondas.
If nature has not given intellect to these animals, it has given them an instinct next thing to it. ”

“ The elm would naturally attract the high-flying insects, and the ash those which stay nearer the earth, though I do not presume to say that was the bird's intention in so arranging them. The mountain-ash trunk was perforated in a different way from the elm, the holes being in lines up and down, and the whole trunk covered five or six feet above the root. ”

“ They are the most powerful of all the trunk muscles, and are those which are most concerned in shortening the body, in effecting the duplicature of the external teguments during the changes of the insect, and which during the larval state mainly assist in locomotion. ”

“ Accordingly, we find that no structure exhibits such strange variations as the skin. Besides the regular modifications which we see in the scales or horny plates of fishes, the smooth coats or solid shells of reptiles, the feathers of birds, and the hair of mammals, numerous other minor peculiarities occur in almost every species. Such are the horns of cows and goats, the spike of the rhinoceros, the beaks, nails, claws, hoofs, and talons of beasts or birds, and the tail-plumes, ruffs, lappets, crests, and ornamental adjuncts of all the more aesthetic animals. ”

“ We need only recall the immense variations they offer within the mammal class. We have the slender legs of the deer and the strong springing legs of the kangaroo, the climbing feet of the sloth and the digging feet of the mole, the fins of the whale and the wings of the bat. ”

“ The wood is brittle and seldom used. The trunk and branches are frequently covered with innumerable long, sharp, and extremely hard spines, protruded in every direction, and in some instances placed so near to each other as to preclude the possibility of any person's climbing them. ”

“ Herbivorous mammals, such as the elephant, rhinoceros, ox, buffalo, horse, &c., owe their great size to their habit of daily distending themselves with food and taking comparatively little exercise. They employ their feet for standing, walking, or running, but not for climbing trees. Hence the thick horn which covers their toes. These toes have become useless to them, and are now in many cases rudimentary only. ”

“ Fig. 7.—Opening Cuts at Back of Prong-horn Antelope's Head.
The Legs.—If the specimen is of medium size, e.g., not larger than a deer, disjoint the legs at shoulder and hip, and leave all the leg bones attached to the skin, just as with small mammals; but, of course, cutting off the flesh and tendons carefully. If the animal is larger than a deer, the skin would be too heavy and cumbersome to handle if all the leg bones were left attached to it. ”

“ With the domesticated rabbit the body, together with the whole skeleton, is generally larger and heavier than in the wild animal, and the leg-bones are heavier in due proportion; but whatever standard of comparison be taken, neither the leg-bones nor the scapulae have increased in length proportionally with the increased dimensions of the rest of the skeleton. ”

“ If crowded closely, the animal will take to the nearest tree if given the opportunity, or may thrust its head beneath a convenient root, log, or rock, then thrash the muscular tail about vigorously in an effort to discourage attack. ”