about together, too fat to go fast, and so secure from harm that they had no cause for haste.
It was a grand world in one sense, but a stupid, useless world in other respects. 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. They would not even take the trouble to settle for posterity the question as to the exact limits of their habitation, but dropped their preposterous bones into snowdrifts, which melted and swept them off to distant sea-beds, or into rivers which tumbled their venerable remains along from the centres of continents to their shores, or left them stranded, with all sorts of incongruous anachronisms, to puzzle the ages to came.
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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. It was in vain that travellers tried to convince Europe that they had seen such an animal with their own eyes, for as soon as they came to the neck part of their description they were put out of court at once. Yet it was a case of “neck or nothing,” and, as our forefathers would not have the neck at any price, they had nothing.
The idea of a zebra was difficult enough for them to entertain, but of a zebra gone to seed, in such a way as these travellers described the giraffe, appeared preposterous and impossible; so they said. Yet in earlier days the giraffe was known to Europe, for Imperial,
