United States or Laos ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The Ephemerides contains an instance of a soldier who fell insensible from the odor of a peony. Wagner knew a man who was made ill by the odor of bouillon of crabs. The odors of blood, meat, and fat are repugnant to herbivorous animals. It is a well-known fact that horses detest the odor of blood.
Thus an animal with sharp talons for catching living prey as a member of the cat tribe has also sharp teeth, adapted for tearing up the flesh of its victim, and a particular type of stomach, quite different from that of herbivorous creatures.
It is really astonishing that only one small ruminant should be found on this immense grassy area, so admirably suited to herbivorous quadrupeds, a portion of which at the present moment affords sufficient pasture to eighty millions of sheep, cattle, and horses. In La Plata the author of The Mammoth and the Flood will find few to quarrel with his doctrine. Of Edentates there are four.
Sheep and goats, like the other herbivorous species which are the common tenants of our fields and forests, belong to the great class of dull-witted mammals in which the intellectual processes appear to be almost altogether limited to ancient and simple emotions, such as are inspired by fear or hunger.
The resemblance, indeed, is so striking as, on Darwinian principles, to suggest the probability of genetic affinity; and it even led Professor Huxley, in his Hunterian Lectures, in 1866, to promulgate the notion that a vast and widely-diffused marsupial fauna may have existed anteriorly to the development of the ordinary placental, non-pouched beasts, and that the carnivorous, insectivorous, and herbivorous placentals may have respectively descended from the carnivorous, insectivorous, and herbivorous marsupials.
And after walking through the Zoological Gardens, and noting the restlessness with which the carnivorous animals pace up and down their cages, it needs but to remember that none of the herbivorous animals habitually display this superfluous energy, to see how clear is the relation between concentration of food and degree of activity.
As I at first observed, these islands are not so remarkable for the number of the species of reptiles, as for that of the individuals, when we remember the well-beaten paths made by the thousands of huge tortoises the many turtles the great warrens of the terrestrial Amblyrhynchus and the groups of the marine species basking on the coast- rocks of every island we must admit that there is no other quarter of the world where this Order replaces the herbivorous mammalia in so extraordinary a manner.
The sloth-like creature was herbivorous, and to feed that mighty carcass entire trees must be stripped of their foliage. The reason for its attacking us might easily be accounted for on the supposition of an ugly disposition such as that which the fierce and stupid rhinoceros of Africa possesses. But these were later reflections.
Colony at Charles Island. James Island. Salt-lake in crater. Natural history of the group. Ornithology, curious finches. Reptiles. Great tortoises, habits of. Marine Lizard, feeds on Sea-weed. Terrestrial Lizard, burrowing habits, herbivorous. Importance of reptiles in the Archipelago. Fish, shells, insects. Botany. American type of organisation.
One of the most interesting results of the study of the facts of evolution is that each type of animal tends to multiply to such an extent as to occupy the whole earth and adapt itself to all possible conditions. In the Secondary period reptiles so adapted themselves: there were oceanic reptiles, flying reptiles, herbivorous reptiles, carnivorous reptiles.
Word Of The Day