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Hippopotamus   Listen
noun
Hippopotamus  n.  (pl. E. hippopotamuses, L. hippopotami)  (Zool.) A large, amphibious, herbivorous mammal (Hippopotamus amphibius), common in the rivers of tropical Africa. It is allied to the hogs, and has a very thick, naked skin, a thick and square head, a very large muzzle, small eyes and ears, thick and heavy body, and short legs. It is supposed to be the behemoth of the Bible. Called also zeekoe, and river horse. A smaller species (Hippopotamus Liberiencis) inhabits Western Africa.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Hippopotamus" Quotes from Famous Books



... to learn from this presumably authoritative source, that the entertaining figure of a patient nondescript animal, upon whose back a small reptile clings, is not intended to typify "back biting," but is intended for a "hippopotamus, or river-horse, carrying his young one upon his shoulders; this is the emblem of a good tutor, or fellow of the college, who is set to watch over the youth." But a large number of the statues are devoted to the Vices, ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison

... the hippopotamus (Pliny, viii. 25; ix. 3 and xxiii. 11). It can hardly be the Mulaccan Tapir, as shields are not made of the hide. Hole suggests the buffalo which found its way to Egypt from India via Persia; but this would ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... a brief period of a few hours' duration, but extended over mayhap millenniums of centuries. No blank chaotic gap of death and darkness separated the creation to which man belongs from that of the old extinct elephant, hippopotamus, and hyaena; for familiar animals such as the red deer, the roe, the fox, the wild cat, and the badger, lived throughout the period which connected their times with our own; and so I have been compelled to hold, that the days of creation were not natural, but prophetic days, ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller

... and the Boastful Hound. It is Leighton now; it was Landseer then. Really I believe that very soon the ladies' papers will devote a column to pictures. Something in this style. 'Smart people are taking down their Rossetti's Annunciations now, and are hanging Gambler Bolton's new Hippopotamus in the place of it. This Hippopotamus is to be the correct thing in pictures this year, and no woman with any claim to be considered smart will fail to have it over her piano. Marcus Stone's new engraving will also be rather chic. Watts's ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells

... out. On the sleeper, I dreamed of this place. I was on a horse—a big, fat ring-horse, with a pad. I rode right through a bunch of cattle. I held on with more zeal than did old Fisheye Gleason when he fell on the back of the hippopotamus at the start of the Grand Entry.... Say," the midget interrupted his reverie, "just about how far away from this Paradise ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney

... bowdlerize the best of these without spoiling them, so I will endeavor to give a few examples of the less forceful. If, for instance, Kameel wanted to indicate size, importance, force, or greatness as an attribute of anything whatever from a flash of lightning to a hippopotamus or an attack of fever he would say "Helovabigwaan," using that term as an adjective. To express disapproval or disgust, he would exclaim "Toodamaach," and shake his head emphatically. The first time I heard the latter expression was when, after a long, ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully

... and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, with Accounts of the Manners and Customs of the People, and of the Chase of the Gorilla, the Crocodile, Leopard, Elephant, Hippopotamus, and other Animals. By PAUL B. DU CHAILLU. Numerous Illustrations. ...
— Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-'61 • Abner Doubleday

... storehouse than what was. Among other articles I saw were: Ivory, powder, percussion caps, old lead, copper, tin, bronze, cloth, looms, pianos, sewing machines, agricultural implements, boilers, steam-engines, ostrich feathers, gum, hippopotamus hides, iron and wooden bedsteads, drums, bugles, field glasses—Lieutenant Charles Grenfell's, lost at El Teb in the Eastern Soudan in 1883, were found there—bolts, zinc, rivets, paints, india-rubber, leather, boots, knapsacks, water-bottles, flags, and clothes. There ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh

... me in a state of nudity, armed with a poisoned spear, and guarded by the skin of a hippopotamus, formed into a shield. In this country, the animal called man is fine, although his wants are few,—some rice, a calabash of palm wine, and the fish he himself spears. Are his ancestors the creators ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli

... hypocrite is much rarer than shallow people think, and, in any case, there was no inducement to make a display in my presence. What influence could I possibly exercise over the fortunes of that great female? A maternal hippopotamus in the Zoo would as soon think of hugging a young giraffe to propitiate the spectators. Of course you may take up the position that the hypocrisy is practised all day before her mistress, and that the mere momentum of habit carries it on at other times. This is plausible, but I suspect that ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA

... his own nose in spite of everything. He wins out with strength, experience, and a new nose; and we are rejoiced at his triumphs. His questions are so funny and yet they seem quite what any elephant with a bump of curiosity might ask. To the Giraffe—"What made his skin spotty?" To the Hippopotamus—"Why her eyes were red?" To the Baboon—"Why melons tasted just so?" And at last, "What does the Crocodile ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready

... seizing upon his treasure. It was pigtail. You may see coils of it in the tobacconists' windows of seaport towns. A pipe full of it would make a hippopotamus vomit, yet old sailors chew it and smoke ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... the headquarters of the various national and political societies. First he went to a restaurant a few doors away, and in five minutes succeeded in making way with a steak that had apparently been manufactured out of the hide of a hippopotamus. Then he jumped into a taxicab and directed the chauffeur at the corner of Twenty-ninth Street to drive as quickly as possible through the crowd down Broadway. But it was impossible for the chauffeur ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff

... vanished entirely from view. Then his head emerged, and it could be seen that he was swimming furiously to keep afloat. Somehow his awkward movements made Bob Archer think of a hippopotamus he had once seen ...
— The Saddle Boys of the Rockies - Lost on Thunder Mountain • James Carson

... that runs round the east shore. Just at dark Billy began to call, and it was beautiful. You know how it goes. Three short grunts, and then a long ooooo-aaaa-ooooh, winding up with another grunt! It sounded lonelier than a love-sick hippopotamus on the house top. It rolled and echoed over the hills as if it would ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various

... head with two cruel eyes and rows of saw-like teeth in its long jaws, sped through the waters. The hippopotamus turned savagely on the intruder and the two snapped savagely at each other for several minutes when the crocodile, mortally wounded to judge by the red swirl on the surface of ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton

... fish is the emblem of aversion, and the Hippopotamus of violence, because it is said to kill its father and to ravish its mother. Hence, says Plutarch, the emblematical inscription of the temple of Sais, where we see painted on the vestibule, 1. A child, 2. An old man, 3. A hawk, ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney

... was over, the judges examined and graded the lines and the scores were announced by Mr. Shrank, the foreman. The better scores prompted little flutters of restrained applause from the executives. This moist and muted sound had reminded Dewforth of a hippopotamus venting its wind under water, and in a moment of thoughtless exhilaration he had even thought of sharing this bizarre notion with his wife. He never did so, ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler

... be. Then again the actual pillage occurs "off," as they say, and the gentlemanly burglar, while not "occupied in burgling," walks the stage a perfect Sir George Alexander of respectability. Do I hear you, gentle reader, exclaiming, like the Scotsman when he first saw a hippopotamus, "Hoots! There's nae sic a animal!" It is simply your ignorance. The joint authors of This Woman to this Man (METHUEN) have selected him as the hero of their latest novel, so there he is. His combined ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 19, 1917 • Various

... he is already rolling like a hippopotamus along "the broad highway of the world's future," and his growling and barking have become transformed into the proud incantations of a religious founder. And is it your own sweet wish, Great Master, to found the religion of the future? "The ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche

... with her hard, hard claw. He asked his tall uncle, the Giraffe, what made his skin spotty, and his tall uncle, the Giraffe, spanked him with his hard, hard hoof. And still he was full of 'satiable curtiosity! He asked his broad aunt, the Hippopotamus, why her eyes were red, and his broad aunt, the Hippopotamus, spanked him with her broad, broad hoof; and he asked his hairy uncle, the Baboon, why melons tasted just so, and his hairy uncle, the Baboon, spanked him with his hairy, hairy paw. And still he was full of 'satiable ...
— Just So Stories • Rudyard Kipling

... the elephant, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus and the wild pig," he said, "they must at one time have been one kind; their teeth are alike, and none of them chew the cud. I think they must be cousins to one another, and, one time, ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen

... this, a new creation of enormous quadrupeds, as yet unknown. Countless herds of elephants pastured by the side of that mighty river, where now the Norfolk fisherman dredges their teeth and bones far out in open sea. The hippopotamus floundered in the Severn, the rhinoceros ranged over the south-western counties; enormous elk and oxen, of species now extinct, inhabited the vast fir and larch forests which stretched from Norfolk to the farthest part of Wales; hyenas and bears double the size of our ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley

... number of flexible hoses sprouting from the top. The whole machine was three-quarters submerged in clinging mud. Off to the right a derrick floated hub-deep in slime; grapplers from it were clinging to the dredge and the derrick was heaving and splashing like a trapped hippopotamus. All about the submerged machine were Mud-pups, working like strange little beavers as the man supervising the operation wiped mud from his face and carried on a running line of ...
— The Native Soil • Alan Edward Nourse

... thickly planted over with mangrove roots and gullies in whose soft banks one sank over the ankles. No camels could have moved, and men with extreme difficulty might struggle through; but we never could have made an available road. We came to a she-hippopotamus lying in a ditch, which did not cover her; Mr. Fane fired into her head, and she was so upset that she nearly fell backward in plunging up the opposite bank: her calf was killed, and was like sucking-pig, though in appearance as large as ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone

... awful fire; but it has risen, like a phoenix, from its ashes, and profited materially by the chastisement. The chief objection I had to the town was the paving of the streets, which was abominable, and full of holes, any of them large enough to bury a hippopotamus, and threatening dislocation of some joint at every step; thus clearly proving that the contract for the paving was in the hands of the surgeons. On similar grounds, it has often occurred to me that the proprietors of the London cabs must ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... the two men, still watching him, betook themselves to work. They seemed to be makers of idols. The father was carving a small wooden statuette of the god Thoth. The son worked on a larger idol, the goddess Apet, or Thoueris, in the shape of a hippopotamus walking upright on hind feet. The idol was of green serpentine, and the mother watched with evident pride the skill with which ...
— Out of the Triangle • Mary E. Bamford

... brighter of colour, greyer of beard, more nervous perhaps in voice and breathing. His manner to Hemmings was full of flattering courtesy; but his sly, ironical glances played on the secretary's armour like a fountain on a hippopotamus. To Scorrier, however, he could ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... ought to take for y^e first yeres of our children, at y^e least waies let vs take example of brute beastes. For it oughte not to greue vs to learne of th[em] a thynge y^t shall be so profitable, of whome mkinde now long ago hath lerned so many fruitful things: sence a beast called Hippopotamus hath shewed y^e cutting of veines, & a bird of egipt called Ibis hath shewed y^e vse of a clister, which y^e phisicis gretly alow. The hearbe called dictamum whiche is good to drawe out arrowes, we haue knowne it bi hartes. Thei ...
— The Education of Children • Desiderius Erasmus

... Southern Italy, stately, solemn, long-horned, cream-colored; there marched great droves of Sorrento hogs—the hog of hogs—a strange but not ill-favored animal, thick in hide, leaden in color, hairless as a hippopotamus. The flesh of the Sorrento hog bears the same relation to common pork that "Lubin's Extrait" bears to the coarse scent of a country grocery. A pork-chop from the Sorrento animal comes to the palate with the force of a new revelation; it is the highest possibility of pork—the apotheosis of ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille

... duyong (from which Malayan word the dugong of naturalists has been corrupted); and I have only to add that, in a register given by the Philosophical Society of Batavia in the first Volume of their Transactions for 1799, appears the article "couda aijeer, rivier paard, hippopotamus" amongst ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden

... first day, then, that this took place. On the others he frequently went down from the raised section to the bottom of the circle and slaughtered all the tame animals that he approached, some of them also being led to him or brought before him in nets. He also killed a tiger, a hippopotamus, and an elephant. After accomplishing this, he retired, but at the conclusion of breakfast fought again as a gladiator. The form of fighting which he practiced and the armor which he used was that pertaining to the so-called secutor: in his right hand he held the ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio

... moving with the slow stream of vehicles on the Avenue, and with Mrs. Billy gazing at him quizzically and asking him if he did not feel like a hippopotamus ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair

... by way of a meal. Few of them ever thought of eating between sunrise and sunset. The lives of the negroes were alternations of gorging and starving, incredible repletion and more incredible fasting; devouring vast masses of hippopotamus-flesh to-day, and starving for a week thereafter; pounds of prime meat to-day, gnawing hunger and the weakness of semi-starvation ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren

... Red-haired Set was ruler there, the god who had to be propitiated by having kings named after him. But Rae, greater than he, could safely pass down the dim river running through that world: could pass in his golden sun-boat, guided by magic words of Thoth instead of oars or sails; and the guardian hippopotamus (whom Greeks turned into the dog Cerberus) dared not put out ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson

... 'em?" he inquired, slightly reining his hippopotamus, and looking me frankly in the face, whilst an almost merry twinkle animated his ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... of melting them down into money the barbarians seized also the ancient statue of the wolf suckling Romulus and Remus; the statues of a sphinx, a hippopotamus, a crocodile, an elephant, and others, which had represented a triumph over Egypt; the monster of Scylla and others; most of which were probably executed ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various

... laughed Frank, feeling particularly good over the grand success that had attended their perilous landing. "Nor a rhinocerous, nor a hippopotamus; but they do have the next largest beast, and that's a tapir. He's something like a big pig and not very dangerous, the senor said. That was what we frightened off just ...
— The Aeroplane Boys on the Wing - Aeroplane Chums in the Tropics • John Luther Langworthy

... him in a less favorable light. They accuse him of having, by horrible crimes, excited against him the anger of the gods, and allege that after a reign of sixty-two years he was killed by a hippopotamus which came forth from the Nile. They also relate that the Saite Tafnakhti, returning from an expedition against the Arabs, during which he had been obliged to renounce the pomp and luxuries of life, had solemnly cursed him, and had caused his imprecations to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various

... and human implements and human bones were to be seen not only bones of the hairy mammoth and cave-bear, woolly rhinoceros and reindeer, which could have been deposited there only in a time of arctic cold, but bones of the hyena, hippopotamus, saber-toothed tiger, and the like, which could have been deposited only when the climate was torrid. The conjunction of these remains clearly showed that man had lived in England early enough and long enough to pass through times of arctic cold, and times ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... horrible growlings, barks, and howlings. As Faust looks towards the poodle he sees it rapidly swelling up into a monstrous form—huger than an elephant or hippopotamus, with fiery eyes and enormous tusks in its gaping mouth. He tries to exorcise the phantom with 'Solomon's key' and other magic formulae, and at length, when he threatens it with the mystic formula of the ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill

... been prolific; the graceful bower-birds and the Tallegalla or mound-raising birds, those wondrous denizens of the Australian wilderness, may now be seen in the Regent's Park for the first time in this hemisphere. For the first time, also, the wart hog of Africa there roots, and the hippopotamus displays his quaint gambols; and that "fairest animal," the giraffe, is now beheld in health and vigor, a naturalized ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various

... Bear," the Flamingo returned, "it would not be polite. The seat I occupy is extremely uncomfortable, thanks to the crowding of the Hippopotamus on my left and the indulgence in peanuts of the Monkey on my right. By sitting down where I am, I am making ...
— Andiron Tales • John Kendrick Bangs

... have got you into the Miantowona Iron Works; but the rascally directors are trying to ruin me now. There's the Union Store, if they happen to want a clerk. I suppose you would be about as handy behind a counter as a hippopotamus. I have no business of my own to train you to. You are not good for the sea, and the sea has probably spoiled you for anything else. A drop of salt water just poisons a landsman. I am sure I don't know what to do ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... brought, and Juanna, my mistress, was set upon it. Then the slave-traders shot down such of the captives as they thought to be of no value, the drivers flogged the slaves with their three-thonged sjambochs of hippopotamus-hide, and the caravan moved on down the banks ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard

... nature's laws suspended here? Real is it, or a phantom show? In length and breadth how doth my poodle grow! He lifts himself with threat'ning mien, In likeness of a dog no longer seen! What spectre have I harbor'd thus! Huge as a hippopotamus, With fiery eye, terrific tooth! Ah! now I know thee, sure enough! For such a base, half-hellish brood, The key of Solomon ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... WOULD come in,' the White Queen went on, 'because he was looking for a hippopotamus. Now, as it happened, there wasn't such a thing in the ...
— Through the Looking-Glass • Charles Dodgson, AKA Lewis Carroll

... as he works on land. In use of arms and hands he reminds one of a monkey, while his clumsy and usually slow-moving body will often suggest the hippopotamus. By using head, hands, teeth, tail, and webbed feet the beaver accomplishes much. The tail of a beaver is a useful and much-used appendage; it serves as a rudder, a stool, and a ramming or signal club. The beaver may use his tail for a trowel, but I have ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills

... to be in good spirits that evening, asked the culprit if he was very fond of tej; the trembling wretch replied in the affirmative. "Well, give him two wanchas [Footnote: A wancha is a large horn cup.] full to make him happy, and afterwards fifty lashes with the girf [Footnote: A long hippopotamus whip.] to teach him another time not to go near the queen's tent." Evidently, Theodore, with a large experience of the beau sexe of his country, was profoundly convinced that his precautions were necessary. On one of his visits to Magdala, one of the chiefs of that amba made a complaint ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc

... things people who disliked her usually found her and sometimes even a little made him believe her. The spirit of mirth in some cold natures manifests itself not altogether happily, their effort of recreation resembles too much the bath of the hippopotamus; but when Mrs. Dallow put her elbows on the table one felt she could be trusted to ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James

... brown bear, grizzly bear, reindeer, red deer, horse, pig, and goat, and some bones evidently hacked by man. In the lower cave earth there were the remains of the hyena, fox, brown and grizzly bears, elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, urus, bison, and red deer, the hacked bones of a goat, and a ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield

... crew making frantic efforts to get them off again. We see the reaches lying ahead glittering like jewels in the sun, and then we land and ride a short way to a temple, under the care of the dragoman of the boat. The most moving thing in all that temple is a set of scenes of a hippopotamus hunt shown with great spirit; the poor little hippo looks more like a pig when he is at the bottom of the water with a spear or harpoon sticking in him, but when they haul him up by means of a noose round one leg the ancient ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton

... of brother Martin's. The 'Behemoth' of Job is beyond a doubt neither whale nor devil, but, I think, the hippopotamus; who is indeed as ugly as the devil, and will occasionally play the devil among the rice-grounds; but though in this respect a devil of a fellow, yet on the whole he is too honest a monster to be a fellow ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... hippopotami, and the gigantic tapir, as well as the fossil rhinoceros, and is extremely probable in respect to the elephant and the smaller tapir. If there be any question of the fact, it is only in respect to the greater hippopotamus. ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various

... the undisturbed portions, giving the results of his work in a paper read before the Royal Society in 1822.[1] Besides the remains of many hyaenas there were teeth or bones of such large animals as the elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, horse, tiger, bear, urus (Bos primi-genius) an unknown animal of the size of a wolf, and three species of deer. The smaller animals included the rabbit, water-rat, mouse, raven, pigeon, lark and a small type of duck. Everything was broken into small pieces so that no single skull ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home

... stepped up, courbash in hand, and measured his distance. The courbash is a fearful whip made of hippopotamus' hide, a stroke from which is felt by a bullock as painfully as a cut from an ordinary whip ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough

... fossil bones to the College of Surgeons, casts of them will be distributed, and descriptions published. They are very curious and valuable; one head belonged to some gnawing animal, but of the size of a Hippopotamus! Another to an ant-eater of the size of ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin

... coast every week.... 'My dear sir,' he cried, 'I write from dictation.' I demanded rivets. There was a way—for an intelligent man. He changed his manner; became very cold, and suddenly began to talk about a hippopotamus; wondered whether sleeping on board the steamer (I stuck to my salvage night and day) I wasn't disturbed. There was an old hippo that had the bad habit of getting out on the bank and roaming at night over the station grounds. The pilgrims used to turn out in a body and empty every rifle they ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad

... the effects of the inundation upon the soil of Egypt—Paucity of the flora: aquatic plants, the papyrus and the lotus; the sycamore and the date-palm, the acacias, the dom-palms—The fauna: the domestic and wild animals; serpents, the urstus; the hippopotamus and the crocodile; birds; fish, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... Hoofed Animals, which comprise many varied forms, such as the horse, the tapir, the rhinoceros, the swine, the hippopotamus, the camel, the deer, the sheep, the cow, ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka

... decorations to the naval and military officers. A pretext presented itself; some insult needed to be avenged, or some debt to be collected. Six battleships, fourteen cruisers, and eighteen transports sailed up the mouth of the river Hippopotamus. Six hundred canoes vainly opposed the landing of the troops. Admiral Vivier des Murenes' cannons produced an appalling effect upon the blacks, who replied to them with flights of arrows, but in spite of their fanatical ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France

... strolling upon the sea-wall on the other side of the road turn their heads towards the cottages. She would go in slowly at the front door, and a moment afterwards there would fall a profound silence. Presently she would reappear, leading by the hand a man, gross and unwieldy like a hippopotamus, with a ...
— To-morrow • Joseph Conrad

... hugeness &c. adj.; enormity, immensity, monstrosity. giant, Brobdingnagian, Antaeus, Goliath, Gog and Magog, Gargantua, monster, mammoth, Cyclops; cachalot, whale, porpoise, behemoth, leviathan, elephant, hippopotamus; colossus; tun, cord, lump, bulk, block, loaf, mass, swad, clod, nugget, bushel, thumper, whooper, spanker, strapper; "Triton among the minnows" [Coriolanus]. mountain, mound; heap &c. (assemblage) 72. largest portion ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... understand just why this peculiar aversion should always be held against the unoffending ape tribe. Why it would not be quite as satisfactory to find one's ancestor in an ape as in the alternative lines of, for example, the cow, or the hippopotamus, or the whale, or the dog has always been a mystery. Yet the fact of this prejudice holds. Probably we dislike the ape because of the very patency of his human affinities. The poor relation is objectionable not so much because he ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams

... The door is open, art free to go. But what do I see in the creature? Is that in the course of nature? Is't actual fact? or Fancy's shows? How long and broad my poodle grows! He rises mightily: A canine form that cannot be! What a spectre I've harbored thus! He resembles a hippopotamus, With fiery eyes, teeth terrible to see: O, now am I sure of thee! For all of thy half-hellish brood The Key ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

... over elephant and hippopotamus paths, and dropped on a catch being touched, after the manner of a springe, are used generally in Africa. They sometimes consist of a "sharp little assegai, or spike, most thoroughly poisoned, and stuck firmly into ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton

... knowledge of medicine, Burton was not able to compound, so after staying two days he took his leave. "It made me sad," says Burton, "to see the wistful, lingering look with which the poor old king accompanied the word Kuahery! (Farewell!)" On the return journey Speke shot a hippopotamus which he presented to the natives, who promptly ate it. By the time Pangany was again reached both travellers were in a high fever; but regarding it simply as a seasoning, they felt gratified rather than not. When the Zanzibar boat arrived Speke was ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright

... revisited the Zoological Gardens, and found that two old friends had got—the one, a companion, the other, a neighbour. The latter was the bulky hippopotamus, now most bearish, and more and more unmistakably showing the minute accuracy of those master lines in the Book of Job, in which Behemoth's portrait, pose, and character are depicted. The former was the subject of this article—evidently, as far as ...
— Heads and Tales • Various

... a shout that could have been heard far away. "I'll be as sthill as an intensified hippopotamus! Not a sound of my voice shall awake the echoes of these purple hills. I'll not be the one to arouse the slumbers ...
— Winning His "W" - A Story of Freshman Year at College • Everett Titsworth Tomlinson

... soil erosion; deforestation; desertification; wildlife populations (such as elephant, hippopotamus, and lion) threatened because of ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... Sarah with dogged determination. She shut her eyes, screwed up her face, spread her arms, struck out with her feet and started. If a hippopotamus had suddenly slipped off the bank there could hardly have been a greater splash; Sarah kicked madly, puffing, panting, and churning the water into foam. All to no avail. Before she had gone a yard she sank like a paving-stone to the bottom ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs

... part to have acquired, before the close of the tertiary period, the characters which essentially distinguish their existing faunas. The eastern continent had then, as now, its great pachyderms, elephants, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus; South America its armadillos, sloths, and ant-eaters; Australia a crowd of marsupials; and the very strange birds of New Zealand had predecessors of similar strangeness. Everywhere the same geographical distribution as now, with a difference in the particular area, as respects the northern ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various

... here restored a garden of Eden, where all the animal kingdom had regained a happy home. This is not quite the case; though, I believe, the creatures are as comfortable as could he expected, and there are certainly a good many strange beasts here. The hippopotamus is the chief treasure of the collection,—an immense, almost misshapen, mass of flesh. At this moment I do not remember anything that interested me except a sick monkey,—a very large monkey, and elderly he ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... a look round, and go on by another ferry to Sag Harbor, thence to arrive at Easthampton. But what do you think happened? Tom, Dick, and Harry's preposterous Hippopotamus broke out in an eruption of flame at the very moment when our procession was passing in review before a large beflagged hotel which faces the Bay. Of course it had never occurred to the boys to bring one of ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)

... excitement at the election; one of the members of the old Board had been called "an ignoramus," in the stress of battle, and being much concerned and mystified asked a neighbour what the term signified, adding, no doubt thinking of a hippopotamus, that he believed it was some kind of animal! His knowledge of zoology was probably as limited as that ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory

... mixture of species, a mixture which puzzles inquirers rather more than it need. Hippopotamus bones are found in great numbers, and with the hippopotamus remains those of creatures like the reindeer and the musk ox, now found only on the Arctic fringe and frozen rim of the North, which lived on the same area and with them the Arctic fox. Judging from the great range of ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish

... a Hippopotamus has recently been brought to England, with all the flesh about it, in a high state of preservation. This amphibious animal was harpooned while in combat with a crocodile, in a lake in the interior of Africa. The head measures near four feet long, and eight feet in circumference; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various

... and, for all consolation, some pleasant Latin sentences over the doors of the various departments, celebrating the solace and delights of learning. This was seeing the College, literally; but it was a good deal like seeing the lion's den, the lion himself being absent on leave,—or like visiting the hippopotamus in Regent's Park on those days in which he remains steadfastly buried in his tank, and will show only the tip of a nostril for your entrance-fee. Still, it was a pleasure to know that learning was so handsomely housed; and as for the little rabble who could not be trusted in the presence of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... commanded thee expressly to love me? Never shall I make thee, I see, even a poor Christian; it would be easier for the sun to pierce the walls of the Mamertine prison than for truth to penetrate thy skull of a hippopotamus." ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... not such a nice place to visit in winter as it is in summer, but the children enjoyed it, and they spent some time in the elephant house, watching the big animals. There was also a hippopotamus there, and oh! what a big mouth he had. The keeper went in between the bars of the hippo's cage, with a pail full of ...
— Bobbsey Twins in Washington • Laura Lee Hope

... is the jaw-bone of a cave-bear—the competitor, one might say, in the matter of lodging-houses, with the gentleman whose anatomy we have just inspected. Here are bones of hippopotamus, and rhinoceros, which he hunted with the weapons you saw. And the object on which your arm is reposing, Madame, is the tooth of an elephant. Our ancestor must have been pretty costaud to kill an elephant with a ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas

... a hippopotamus on the bank," said the man, "and fired at him with your big rifle; and I did not know it would kick so hard, and it kicked me over, and it fell ...
— The Story of General Gordon • Jeanie Lang

... I said. Ye needn't repeat it—'Liza ... Adams—'s if I'd mentioned a hippopotamus. I git out of patience with ye. I b'lieve in my heart ye think ye ought to git a wife that'd look like ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... some spots the Milola, an umbrageous hibiscus, with large yellowish flowers, grows in masses along the bank. Its bark is made into cordage, and is especially valuable for the manufacture of ropes attached to harpoons for killing the hippopotamus. The Pandanus or screw-palm, from which sugar bags are made in the Mauritius, also appears, and on coming out of the canal into the Zambesi many are so tall as in the distance to remind us of the steeples of our native land, and make ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone

... that which contains the Grecian host. It was, however, in this mutilated state when discovered, and seems to have been under a process of reparation. The border represents a river, apparently the Nile, with a crocodile, hippopotamus, ichneumon, ibises, etc.; whence some have been led to think that the mosaic is a copy of a picture on the same subject known to have been painted by a female Egyptian artist named Helena, and brought to ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... the hippopotamus, gentlemen," said Phipps, "fresh from his native woods. He sleeps underneath the banyan-tree, and lives on the nuts of the hick-o-ree, and pursues his prey with his tail extended upward and one eye open, and ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland

... Philadelphia, has detected about thirty remains of species of extinct mammalia. Many of these belonged to animals such as the hippopotamus, rhinoceros, tapir, etc. One extinct animal, called the Oreodon, had grinding teeth like lions, cats, etc., and must have belonged to a race that lived on vegetables and flesh, and yet chewed the cud like a cow. Another called the Machairodus, was wholly ...
— Three Years on the Plains - Observations of Indians, 1867-1870 • Edmund B. Tuttle

... thought I was safe. But he didn't try to crawl under the floor after me. He went inside the shed and found that the boards of the floor sank beneath his weight like spring boards. And there that human hippopotamus stood jumping up and down while he mashed me into the mud like a mole under a pile-driver. I had showed that I had "a head on me like a nail" when I crawled under that floor and let Fatty step on me. There is a saying, "You can't keep a good man down." But Fatty kept me down, and so I must admit ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis

... you," said the Noah's Ark Lion. "I have been quite lonesome. There used to be a number of us—there was a Tiger, a Camel, a Monkey, a Hippopotamus, and, oh! ever so many others, besides the Elephant. But we are all scattered. I am the only one left. Tell me, were you ever in a ...
— The Story of a Lamb on Wheels • Laura Lee Hope

... that condition, there is no knowing whether drink would not render him quite furious, and ten times more unmanageable than ever. No, take my word for it, Mr. Nabbum, that I know Huggermugger too well to attempt any of your tricks with him. You cannot catch him as you would an elephant or a hippopotamus. Be guided by me, and see if my plan don't ...
— The Last of the Huggermuggers • Christopher Pierce Cranch

... inyala, the water tragelaph (Limnotragus selousi), the kudu and Livingstone's eland. The only buffalo is the common Cape species. The hyaena is the spotted kind. The hunting dog is present. There are some seven species of monkeys, including two baboons and one colobus. The hippopotamus is found in the lakes and rivers, and all these sheets of water are infested with crocodiles, apparently belonging to but one species, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... Zumbo we came to a party of hereditary hippopotamus hunters, called Makembwe or Akombwe. They follow no other occupation, but when their game is getting scanty at one spot they remove to some other part of the Loangwa, Zambesi, or Shire, and build temporary huts on an island, where their women cultivate patches: the flesh of ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone

... moreover, for driving and riding. There was a North American buffalo of immense size; also an elephant from Africa, and one from Asia; beside these, a prodigious number of gazelles, deer, cats, and dogs; skeletons of a hippopotamus and an elephant; and lastly the fossil bones of a mammoth. You know that the mammoth is no longer found living, and that the remains hitherto discovered lead to the belief that it was a species of carnivorous elephant. It is a singular fact ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz

... fowl for dinner," said Judy, in a half-choked voice. "Oh, Esther, why couldn't you have had cow, or horse, or hippopotamus—anything but roast fowl?" ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner

... greatly struck with the fact itself (87/3. This refers to the discovery of recent and fossil species of animals in an Australian cave-breccia. Mr. Clift is quoted as having identified one of the bones, which was much larger than the rest, as that of a hippopotamus.), which I had quite forgotten. I copied the passage, and sent it to Owen. Why I gave in some detail references to my own work is that Owen (not the first occasion with respect to myself and others) quietly ignores ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... Ungulata contains the hoofed beasts; that is, all oxen, deer, antelopes, sheep, goats, camels, hogs, the hippopotamus, the different kinds of rhinoceros, the tapirs, horses, asses, zebras, ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart

... hitherto unknown, the gnu—an animal in form something between the horse and the ox—the gazelle, the baboon, and the hippopotamus, the habits of which were previously imperfectly known, Sparrman describes a curious bird, of great service to the natives, which ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne

... Edfu. When Thoth saw these he said, "Let your hearts rejoice, O gods of heaven, Let your hearts rejoice, O ye gods who dwell on the earth. The Young Horus cometh in peace. On his way he hath made manifest deeds of valour, according to the Book of slaying the Hippopotamus." And from that day they made ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge

... Industry claim that before long we will partake of antelope steak. For the antelope has been found to be particularly adapted to the more arid western sections of the country. And beyond that the gastronomist of the future will have to reckon with loin of hippopotamus! ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall

... wanted but little at any moment to become open war, as it did in James the First's time, when those meek missionaries, by their gentle moral tortures, literally hunted to death the poor Popish bishop of Hippopotamus (that is to say, London) for the ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... species, and the arrival and spread of some others. The apes living as far north as Germany in the Miocene Age were restricted to Southern France and Italy in the Pliocene, and, at its close, vanished altogether from Europe. The first living species of mammals is found in the remains of the hippopotamus that frequented the rivers of Pliocene times. The mastodon of Miocene times was still to be seen, but along with it was a species of true elephants. The hipparion survived into this epoch, but the horse also makes its appearance. Great quantities of deer ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen

... contemporary, adopted something like his peculiarities of style and domesticated foreign idioms, that yet, like tamed tigers, are not to be relied on in general society. As Carlyle was the rhinoceros of English, Emerson aspired to be its hippopotamus,—both pachyderms, and impenetrable to ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... suddenly decided at the very moment he was in the middle of making a body for a man, that out of all the animals man should be immortal—and had let it go at that. With the exception of the giraffe and perhaps the goose or camel and an extra fold or so in the hippopotamus, we are easily the strangest, the most unexplained-looking shape on the face of the earth. It is exceedingly unlikely that we are beautiful or impressive, at first at least, to any one but ourselves. Nearly all the things we do with ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee

... called down from the truck. Casey looked up, startled, and tried to remember just what he had said before the girls appeared to silence him. The woman was very large both in height and in bulk, and she was heaving herself out of the truck in a way that reminded Casey oddly of a disgruntled hippopotamus he had once watched coming out of its tank at a circus. Casey moved modestly away and did not look, after that first glance. A truck, you will please understand, is not a touring car, and ladies who have passed the two-hundred-pound ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower

... appearance of floating logs, but which, when we drew near to them, proved to be, in almost every instance, the heads of basking alligators. And before we had been in the river ten minutes we were startled by a huge black bulk breaking water close alongside the boat, which turned out to be a hippopotamus. ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood

... Hillock altajxeto. Hilt tenilo. Him lin. Himself sin mem. Hind cervino. Hinder posta. Hinder malhelpi. Hinderance malhelpo. Hindermost lasta. Hindoo Hindo. Hindrance malhelpo. Hindu Hindo. Hinge cxarniro. Hint proponeti. Hip kokso. Hippodrome hipodromo. Hippopotamus hipopotamo. Hire dungi. Hire, cost of salajro. Hireling salajrulo. His lia, sia. Hiss sibli. Historian historiskribanto. History historio. History, natural naturscienco. Hit frapi. Hit against ektusxegi. Hitch malhelpajxo. Hive abelujo. Ho! ho! Hoard ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... consultation and talked foreign languages and pretended very seriously to understand one another. One said the stars were in opposition, another said he had gazed into a crystal and had seen a glow-worm chasing a hippopotamus which a third interpreted as meaning the princess would die if the glow-worm ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa

... could not see much, since in that great cavern two lamps of hippopotamus oil gave but little light. Presently, however, her eyes became accustomed to the gloom, and as they advanced up its length she perceived that save for a skin rug upon which she guessed the Molimo sat at his solitary devotions, ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard

... our old stories; and we shall drop off one by one; and there will be fewer and fewer of us, and these very old and feeble. There will be but ten prae-railroadites left: then three — then two — then one — then 0! If the hippopotamus had the least sensibility (of which I cannot trace any signs either in his hide or his face), I think he would go down to the bottom of his tank, and never come up again. Does he not see that he belongs to bygone ages, and that his great hulking barrel ...
— Some Roundabout Papers • W. M. Thackeray

... history of Ceylon and India, &c. are given, which are very accurate and complete: the cocoa-nut with its properties is described: the pepper plant, the buffalo, the camelopard, the musk animal, &c.: the rhinoceros, he says, he saw only at a distance; he procured some teeth of the hippopotamus, but never saw the animal itself. In the palace of the king of Abyssinia, the unicorn was represented in brass, but he never saw it. It is extraordinary that he makes no mention of cinnamon, as ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson

... basalts) attained their maximum in later Pliocene and Quaternary times. Their development, feeble as compared with the acid rocks, is meridional. The Quaternary period includes an older stage containing fragments of fossils from the underlying formations; a later stage containing the bones of Hippopotamus, Elephas, Rhinoceros, Camelus, Equus; and finally the vast accumulations of sand which began to be formed in prehistoric times. The broad platforms of the hamada are covered with Quaternary ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... it's being real on the other side of the river,' said Jane. And now there was a crackling of reeds and twigs behind them. This was horrible. Of course it might be another hippopotamus, or a crocodile, or a lion—or, ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit

... the floor of the hall creak under this man's hippopotamus feet, and the unhappy Sulpice who had spun so many, such glorious and grand dreams, dreams of liberty, freedom and virtue, civic regeneration, reconstructed national morals and character, the sacredness ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie

... given him in lieu of half a year's wage. The Zulu had it from a half-caste whose kraal was beyond Delagoa Bay. As a matter of fact it was a Somali knife, manufactured from the soft native steel which takes an edge like a razor, and with a handle cut out of the tusk of a hippopotamus. For the rest, it was about a foot long, with three grooves running the length of the ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard

... Acheul, in the alluvial deposits of the Somme, of flints shaped into the form of hatchets associated with the remains of extinct animals such as the mammoth, the cave lion, the RHINOCEROS INCISIVUS, the hippopotamus, and other animals whose presence in France is not alluded to either in history or tradition. The uniformity of shape, the marks of repeated chipping, and the sharp edges so noticeable in the greater number of these hatchets, cannot be sufficiently accounted for either ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac

... South America, the other of Sumatra and Malacca. Its anatomy is much like that of the rhinoceros, while in general form the tapir reminds us of the hog. It is a massive and powerful animal, and its fondness for the water is almost as strong as that displayed by the hippopotamus. It swims and dives admirably, and will remain submerged for many minutes, rising to the surface for breath, and then again plunging in. When hunted or wounded, it always, if possible, makes for the water; and in its nightly wanderings will traverse rivers and ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various

... you graceful, don't get gay Back-to before the hippopotamus; If meek and godly, find some place to play Besides right where three mad hyenas fuss; You may hear language ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various

... conscious flutter? If so, did she live near Oxford?" If there is anything worse than an unimaginative man trying to write imaginatively, it is a heavy man when he fancies he is being facetious. He tramples out the last spark of cheerfulness with the broad damp foot of a hippopotamus. ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell

... nothing special, more than that he was a pure negro, with enormously thick lips, flattened nose, long protruding heels, teeth white as hippopotamus ivory, and almost always set in a good-humored grin. The darkey had been a sailor, or rather ship-steward, before landing in Peru. Thither had he strayed, and settled at Cerro Pasco after several years spent aboard ship. He was ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various

... The hippopotamus, or river-horse, is found exclusively in the great rivers, lakes, and swamps of Africa. Fossil remains of extinct species have been discovered in both Europe and Asia, but ages have passed since they existed. ...
— Harper's Young People, March 16, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... the pageant. Mr. Reuter will soon have completed his Overland Telegraph to China. At Liverpool they call New York "over the way." The Prince of Wales's travels in his nonage have made Telemachus a tortoise, and the young Anacharsis a stay-at-home. Married couples spend their honeymoon hippopotamus hunting in Abyssinia, or exploring the sources of the Nile. And the Traveller's Club are obliged to blackball nine-tenths of the candidates put up for election, because now-a-days almost every tolerably educated Englishman has travelled more than six hundred miles in a straight direction from ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... clowns, the tumblers, the strong men, and the riders flying about in the air as if the laws of gravitation no longer existed. But, best of all, was the grand conglomeration of animals where the giraffe appears to stand on the elephant's back, the zebra to be jumping over the seal, the hippopotamus to be lunching off a couple of crocodiles, and lions and tigers to be raining down in all directions with their mouths, wide open and their tails as stiff as that of the famous ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott

... the African deserts were always amused whenever I addressed a remark to the dromedary who was my property for two months; yet at the end of that time the beast evidently knew the meaning of a number of simple sentences. Some years ago, seeing the hippopotamus in Barnum's museum looking very stolid and dejected, I spoke to him in English, but he did not even open his eyes. Then I went to the opposite corner of the cage, and said in Arabic, 'I know you; come here to me.' I repeated the words, and thereupon he came to the corner where I was standing, pressed ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon

... parlour-maid who 'went to fetch the beer' for supper: first (as I now recall it) assuming the likeness of a black dog, and gradually rising on its hind-legs and swelling into the semblance of some quadruped greatly surpassing a hippopotamus: which apparition—not because I deemed it in the least improbable, but because I felt it to be really too large to bear—I feebly endeavoured to explain away. But, on Mercy's retorting with wounded dignity that the parlour-maid was her own sister-in-law, ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens

... you always flee from me, yet I always took good care of you. I bathed you with perfumed water in a bowl of alabaster; I smoothed your heel with pumice-stone mixed with palm-oil; your nails were cut with golden scissors and polished with a hippopotamus tooth; I was careful to select tatbebs for you, painted and embroidered and turned up at the toes, which were the envy of all the young girls in Egypt. You wore on your great toe rings bearing the device of the sacred ...
— The Mummy's Foot • Theophile Gautier

... dislocated the proper autochthons of Europe. In the Pleistocene age there existed in Central Europe a rude race of hunters and fishers, closely allied to the Esquimaux. Man was contemporary with the cave bear, the cave lion, the amphibious hippopotamus, the mammoth. Caves that have been examined in France or elsewhere have furnished for the stone age, axes, knives, lance and arrow points, scrapers, hammers. The change from what has been termed the chipped, to the polished stone period, was very gradual. It coincides ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper

... a farm. Indeed, in his power to obey the primal command to "subdue the earth," my man, Abraham, is a hero—although, I imagine, he scarcely knows what the word means and would as soon think of himself as a hippopotamus. His fortunes would often seem as dark as himself to those who "take thought for the morrow;" and that is saying much, for Abraham is "colored" as far ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe

... likely he would be subjected to the agony of an encore, and he knew, beyond all doubt, that he would never be permitted to forget the figure he should cut; for Happy Jack knew he was as unbeautiful as a hippopotamus and as awkward. He wondered why he, of all the fellows who were to take part, should be chosen for that tableau; it seemed to him they ought to pick out someone who was at least passably good-looking and hadn't such big, red hands and ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower

... most of them had little, but their elders or leaders wore lion and leopard skins and some were clad in a kind of silken tunic belted about the middle. All were armed for war with long bows, short swords and small shields round in shape and made from the hide of the hippopotamus or of the unicorn. Gold was plentiful amongst them since even the humblest wore bracelets of that metal, while about the necks of the chieftains it was wound in great torques, also sometimes on their ankles. They wore sandals on their feet and some of them had ostrich feathers stuck in their hair, ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard

... visiting the cages first. I do not complain of your natural wish to begin with the giraffe, because it has such an absurdly long neck and may possibly mistake Pamela's straw-hat for a bunch of hay and try to eat it, and because you will be able to see the hippopotamus on the way. As a matter of fact you will find that the giraffe is not standing near the bars at all, but close to its stable, where it is mincing and bridling exactly like a lady in a Victorian novel, and as for the hippopotamus you cannot see the pretty ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various

... are really beautiful; none but the smallest being cooped up in glazed cases; but many are effectively placed on branches of trees, whilst the quadrupeds are arranged with still better taste. Among the latter is a fine Hippopotamus, the Behemoth of Scripture. We are happy to hear this exhibition has already been numerously visited, since it augurs well of public taste ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction - Vol. X, No. 289., Saturday, December 22, 1827 • Various



Words linked to "Hippopotamus" :   even-toed ungulate, Hippopotamus amphibius, artiodactyl mammal



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