Free TranslationFree Translation
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Gorilla   Listen
noun
Gorilla  n.  (Zool.) A large, arboreal, anthropoid ape of West Africa. It is larger than a man, and is remarkable for its massive skeleton and powerful muscles, which give it enormous strength. In some respects its anatomy, more than that of any other ape, except the chimpanzee, resembles that of man.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Gorilla" Quotes from Famous Books



... Daimonion. Let us take continual care, especially within the precincts of the Temple of Science, lest by abusing the gift of speech or doing violence to the voice of conscience, we soil the two wings of our soul, and fall back, through our own fault, to the dreaded level of the Gorilla. ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller

... And seeing Doggie wince, he said heartily: "Ah! I'll soon set that right for you. I'll get you something—an india-rubber contrivance to practise with for half an hour a day, and you'll develop a hand like a gorilla's." ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke

... late to stop that gorilla-like spring, and Mut-mut, with a glitter of steel flashing in one of his outspread palms, launched himself upon them, landing, like some huge and horrible cat of dreams, on all fours in the ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming

... bitterly: "You used to come in here, the first year, with notions of society women that would have disgraced a Goth, or a gorilla. Did you form your estimate of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... a cigarette And sought some other social set Where, in some other knots or rings, People were doing cultured things, —Miss Zwilt's Humane Vivarium —The little men that paint on gum —The exquisite Gorilla Girl.... He sometimes, in this giddy whirl (Not being really bad at heart), Remembered Shakespeare with a start— But not with that grand constancy Of Clement Shorter, Herbert Tree, Lord Rosebery and Comyns Carr And all the other names there are; Who ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton

... An intelligent gorilla has recently been imported to this country, who had the good fortune to serve the Doctor as a body servant in the interior of Africa, and he thus describes the manner of his master's death. The Doctor was accustomed to pass his nights in the stomach of an acquaintance-a ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile

... neck was massive, and an angry red, sprinkled with long, wiry hairs. It fastened his flat-backed head to a body that was like a gorilla's, thick and wide and humped. And his arms gave an added touch of the animal, for they were so long that his great palms reached to his knees; and so sprung out at the shoulder, and so curved in at the wrist, that when they met at ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates

... to move fast, without the risk of being heard by the huge apes, I retreated rapidly. I was not aware at the time that I had fallen in with a family of the largest existing specimens of the ape tribe since known as the terrible gorilla, although at that time I was ignorant of its name. I was only too soon to become in a terrible way better acquainted with ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston

... God! [She makes repeated efforts to drag him with her. At one of these efforts he embraces her with the clumsiness of a gorilla and makes several indecent gestures. HELEN utters suppressed cries for help.] Let go! This minute! Let go-o!! Oh, please, papa, Oh-o!! [She weeps, then suddenly cries out in an extremity of fear, ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann

... muscle-bound gorilla!" she jeered. "That I want to see! Any time you want to get both arms broken at the elbows, just ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith

... John asked her to go with him to hear a lecture. Just about that time he was rather wild concerning natural history, for which, I am sorry to say, Marjory did not care a pin. She indignantly repelled the idea of a gorilla somewhere toward the top of her family tree, asserting that she preferred to believe that she had descended from so mean a man as Adam, and so curious a woman as Eve, to that: furthermore, she was indifferent upon the subject. But there was not much she would not do to please ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various

... time be so inured to danger in the pursuit of our big game, that we will go and hunt an animal which is, I think, the most dangerous creature with which man can contend. I mean the Gorilla. ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton

... of ENNIUS runs: "Nucibus non ludere possum." Perhaps the most plausible theory is that which views the phrase as a heritage from our simian ancestors, among whom nuts were the common medium of exchange. On this assumption a monkey—whether gorilla, chimpanzee, baboon or orangutan—who was described as unable to do anything "for nuts," i.e., for pecuniary remuneration, was obviously inefficient. Another explanation, which we believe is supported by Mr. EUSTACE MILES, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 19th, 1914 • Various

... After locating our gorilla and chimpanzee ancestors in Africa, he concludes that "it is useless to speculate on this subject." If the uselessness of speculation had occurred to him at the beginning of his investigation he might have escaped responsibility ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan

... and deadly simple a manner, gave the Master some highly conflicting thoughts. The fact that no blood was ever to be shed in this city had reassuring aspects. On the other hand, how many of these Maghrabi stranglers did Bara Miyan keep as a standing army? A Praetorian guard of men with gorilla-hands like the two already seen might, in a close corner, prove more formidable than men armed with the archaic firearms of the place ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England

... has accordingly resulted in the evolution of higher forms, and it is there that we find both extinct and surviving species of man's nearest collateral relatives, those tailless half-human apes, the gorilla, chimpanzee, orang, and gibbon. It is altogether probable that the people whom the Spaniards found in America came by migration from the Old World. But it is by no means probable that their migration occurred within so short a period as five or six thousand years. ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske

... kept on. Don't you know, how in the stories it is always in a terrific gale that the caged lion or gorilla or python breaks loose and terrorizes the ship? We don't sport a menagerie on the ——, but I did pick up the contents of the dry gun-cotton case, which had broken and spilt the torpedo detonators around on deck contiguous to the hot radiator! And, of course, the decks below were ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various

... these birds as being ruthlessly cut short and their young left to die in their nests in the agonies of cruel starvation. If we compare with this state of mind that of the African of whom Burton wrote in his Two Trips to Gorilla Land, that "Cruelty seems to be with him a necessity of life, and all his highest enjoyments are connected with causing pain and inflicting death"—we need no other argument to convince us that a savage cannot possibly feel romantic love, because that implies ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... the gorilla!" cried Peterkin, while a glow of enthusiasm lighted up his eyes. "You've heard of the gorilla, Ralph, of course—the great ape—the enormous puggy—the huge baboon—the man monkey, that we've been hearing so much of for some years back, and that the niggers on the African ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne

... YORK, November 14, 1905. DEAR MR. ROW,—That alleged portrait has a private history. Sarony was as much of an enthusiast about wild animals as he was about photography; and when Du Chaillu brought the first Gorilla to this country in 1819 he came to me in a fever of excitement and asked me if my father was of record and authentic. I said he was; then Sarony, without any abatement of his excitement asked if my grandfather ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... the boasted physical formation of us men, you are aware that the best-shaped amongst us, according to the last scientific discoveries, is only a development of some hideous hairy animal, such as a gorilla; and the ancestral gorilla itself had its own aboriginal forefather in a small marine animal shaped like a two-necked bottle. The probability is that, some day or other, we shall be exterminated by ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... and Dr. Charles Dawson, in reconstructing a man from the Piltdown skull, discovered in 1912 on Piltdown Common, near Ucksfield, Sussex, England, built up something essentially monkey-like, with receding forehead, projecting brows, and a gorilla-like lower jaw. Prof. Keith, a renowned specialist, checking up on this reconstruction, comes to an entirely different conclusion. He finds that the work of Drs. Dawson and Woodward was done "in open defiance of all that scientists know about skulls, whether ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner

... Asia, countries where the climate is most uniform, the forests densest, and the supply of fruit abundant throughout the year. These animals are now comparatively well known, consisting of the orang-utan of Borneo and Sumatra, the chimpanzee and the gorilla of West Africa, and the group of gibbons or long-armed apes, consisting of many species and inhabiting South-Eastern Asia and the larger Malay Islands. These last are far less like man than the other three, one or other of which has at various times been claimed to be ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... motion of his gorilla-like arms Blake pushed his boat free, telling himself there was still time, warning himself to keep cool and make the most of every chance. Yet as he turned to take up the oars he saw that he had been discovered by the Ecuadoreans on the freighter's ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer

... Kid leaped in. Blacksnake was still squirming about and clawing for his .45 when the Texan's first blow landed. Blacksnake was burly, powerful. He weighed well over two hundred, and his shoulders were as broad as a gorilla's. But his bullet head went back with a jerk, as the Texan's hard fist thudded heavily ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens

... proof, to return to the muttons, it may be observed that the next link to manhood, in the philosopher's chain, is that highly attractive animal which M. DU CHAILLU has recently introduced to the general public. The points of resemblance betwixt the Gorilla and the Boy are numerous and striking. In most cases, the two animals have an equally pleasing exterior. They both have the ability to climb giddy heights, inaccessible to any other wingless biped. Their language ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various

... stupidly. Still he did not speak, but moistened his lips with a swollen tongue. He began to sink slowly back into the blankets, supine and inert. Nicodemus sat on the edge of the bunk and passed a long gorilla arm about his shoulders. He motioned to his wife, who stood watching, arms akimbo, her face expressive of lively sympathy. She went to the shelves where stood the jars of liquor, returning with a brimming horn cup. Nicodemus took this, tilted back the heavy head at his shoulder, and started ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor

... and passed to the right of Ricardo, who lowered his glance for a moment. They sat down at the table. The enormous gorilla back of Pedro ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad

... D'Arnot, in conclusion. "It is the fact that this man overcame you that hurts the most. But you need feel no shame. You would not make apologies for defeat had you been penned in that small room with an African lion, or with the great Gorilla of ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... by the superior size and strength of the Thing, by the almost manlike cunning of the low, gorilla face, the gleam of intelligence in the reddened eye, the crude wreath of maple-leaves upon the head, the necklace of ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... hairy body and gorilla arms, climbed to my left shoulder, sat down on his hunkers and whispered in ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny

... Not otherwise, lovers of their fellow man have finally become perfectly hopeless with reference to the German people. They have no more relations to the civilization of 1918 than an orang-outang, a gorilla, a Judas, a hyena, a thumbscrew, a scalping knife in the hands of a savage. These brutes must be ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis

... other hand, was as heavily moulded as a bulldog. His arms were short and blocky; his shoulders welted with brawn; his chest was two hairy hills, like a gorilla's, while across his stomach muscles lay ridged like ropes. His waist was thick with pones of sinew bulging over the hips, as one sees in the statue of Discobolus. It was plain that Greer had labored tremendously all his life and that ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling

... to-day—it's an idyll—and just to show how I thought of you, I told 'Dal, coming home, about your Gubby Dance, and she told Winnie. Winnie came back in our char-a-banc. After a bit we had to get out and dance it in a field. It's quite a dance the way we did it—and Lafone invented a sort of gorilla lockstep procession at the end. Bat had sent down a film-chap on the chance of getting something. He was the son of a clergyman—a most dynamic personality. He said there isn't anything for the cinema in meetings ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling

... scorn dates back, according to Darwin, to a prehuman stage of development, and is seen in its useful form in animals like the dog or gorilla that have large canine teeth. Baring the teeth in these animals is a preparation for using the teeth; and often, also, it frightens the enemy away and saves the bother of actually attacking "small fry". The movement, Darwin urges, has survived in the race, even after fighting ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth

... round man. He wore a skull-cap to keep his bald spot warm, and read his paper through a reading-glass. The expression of his face, wrinkled and bearded, the eyes shadowed by enormous gray eyebrows, was that of an amiable gorilla. ...
— Blix • Frank Norris

... angular about him!—but the nerves within tireless as the stream he pulled against. On the lead, in harness, his long arms swung like pendulums, his whole body leant forward at an acute angle, the gait steady, and the step solid as the tramp of a gorilla. Some coarse black hairs clung here and there to his upper lip; his fine brown eyes were embedded in wrinkles, and his swarthy features, though clumsy, were kindly—a good-humoured face, which, at a cheerful word or glance, lit up at once with the grotesque grin of an animated gargoyle. This ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair

... gorilla," was Zulu's civil rejoinder, "you kin git another pair when nixt we goes aboard de mission-ship. Till den you kin grin ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne

... from South Africa before the encroachments of civilised man. The day is not distant when they will cease to exist in the wild state in any part of Africa, and with them are vanishing many splendid antelopes. Even our "nearest and dearest" relatives in the animal world, the gorilla, the chimpanzee and the ourang, are doomed. Now that man has learnt to defy malaria and other fevers the tropical forest will be occupied by the greedy civilised horde of humanity, and there will be no room for the most interesting and wonderful of all animals, the man-like apes, unless ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester

... still an ape, a huge, fierce, terrible beast of a species closely allied to the gorilla, yet more intelligent; which, with the strength of their cousin, made her kind the most fearsome of ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... extend itself forwards, and this goes on in the human race. The cranial capacity of the European exceeds that of the Australian by forty cubic inches, or nearly four times as much as that by which the Australian exceeds the gorilla; and the expansion is almost entirely in the upper and anterior portions. But the increase of the cerebral surface is shown not only in the general size of the organ, but to a still greater extent in the irregular creasing and ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske

... that one of the brutes had seized their stalwart companion's rifle from him and with incredible strength had broken it in half as if it had been a wooden toy. The next minute Harry's rifle spoke and the gorilla that had just performed the miraculous feat of strength fell dead. With a shriek of rage the others turned to see whence ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton

... idealised to a point of extraordinary personal beauty, while the artist himself appears in the corner as a malignant ape of hideous aspect. This was balm, no doubt, to the gentleman who had been so incensed at being "caricatured, now as a potato, now as a gorilla;" while the situation ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann

... rage and pain he bored in. He had but one chance—to get this shadow in his gorilla-like arms. He lacked mental flexibility. An idea, getting into his head, stuck; it was not adjustable. Like an arrow sped from the bowstring, it had to fulfill its destiny. It never occurred to him to take to his heels, to get space between himself and this enemy he had so woefully underestimated. ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath

... The gorilla is still the terror of some of the wild places of the earth; as he booms his way through the impenetrable forests, he sends forth his note of warning, beating his great hairy breast, and all living things flee before ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield

... so than others in the district. The harshness of nature is strongly reflected in all faces. Having passed a man on the bank of the stream washing his linen—presumably his own—with bare arms, sinewy and hairy like a gorilla's, I was again in the open country; but instead of following donkey-paths and sheep-tracks I was upon the dusty highroad. Well, even a, route nationale, however hot and dusty, so that it be not too straight, has its advantages, which ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker

... make the point at issue plain. Everyone knows that in many respects, in the structure of the skeleton, and the curve of the backbone, and in the development of the brain, the man-like monkeys, the gorilla and its allies, are intermediate between man and the lower monkeys. In the early days of evolution it was assumed frequently that the gorilla, etc., were therefore to be regarded as ancestors of man, and they appear as such in more than one well-known treatise on evolutionary ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell

... science cannot bridge—by virtue of the moral and religious nature of man, yet he pointedly protests against confounding distinct orders of ideas, and insists that man as a physical being is clearly of the same order as the gorilla and ape; and he does not shrink from accepting the possibility that they all may have sprung by successive stages or 'leaps' from the same primordial form. His concluding words are, that 'so far from having a materialistic tendency, the supposed ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various

... men, whom some scientific philosophers would place at one remove from the gorilla, run all manner of risks, by day and night, for forty weeks; now going around by circuitous route to resort to strategem to get their precious burden through the country; sometimes forced to fight their foes in order to carry out their holy mission. Follow them as ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various

... no embargo on its being offered to baboons. They are addicted to spirituous liquors, and on the whole it is best to get them to take the pledge. A valued correspondent of ours, Canon Phibbs, once had a tame gorilla which invariably accompanied Mrs. Phibbs at Penny Readings; but this interesting animal died suddenly from a surfeit of mushrooms, and Canon Phibbs has also ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various

... cantillate his "copy" into the horn of a graphophone or use a motor-stylus? Does Mr. SIEGRIED SASSOON beat his breast with one hand while he plays the loud bassoon with the other? Does Mr. ALEC WAUGH use sermon-paper or foolscap? Does Mr. ALDOUS HUXLEY keep a tame gorilla? These are the really illuminating details that we hunger for. Without them it is impossible to appreciate the artistry of our young Masters. Mr. W.L. GEORGE has given us a glimpse of the working of their brains; let him now reveal to us ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 24, 1920. • Various

... a horse of steel Wound up with a ratchet-wheel. Every beast I'd put to rout Like the man I read about. I would singe the leopard's hair, Stalk the vampire and the adder, Drive the werewolf from his lair, Make the mad gorilla madder. Needle-guns my work should do. But, if beasts got closer to, I would pierce them to the marrow With a barbed and poisoned arrow, Or I'd whack 'em on the skull Till ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler

... will do whatever her son wishes. She would be kind to a young gorilla if I said so. Don't fear for your niece—she will be ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming

... old African legend which, like all those things, has a grain of truth in it. The legend is, that the monkeys first found out the properties of the leaf, and it is because they live on it that they are so strong. Do you know that a gorilla's arm is not half so thick as yours, and yet he would take you and snap your backbone across his knee; he would bend a gun-barrel as you would bend a cane, merely by the turn of his wrist. That is Simiacine. He can hang on to a tree with one leg and tackle a leopard with his bare hands—that's ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman

... crumbs of comfort may be found by the reactionists in the fact that it is not held by Professor Haeckel, or by any other competent authority, that the link which pithecanthropus supplies welds man directly with any existing man-ape—with gorilla, chimpanzee, or orang. It is held that these highest existing apes are side branches, so to say, of the ancestral tree, who developed, in their several ways, contemporaneously with our direct ancestors, but are not themselves ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams

... crouching for the grip, his hands out like a gorilla's. The quiet voice, from the yawing mouth, beneath the steady, flaming eyes, was deadly. There is something inhuman in a ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown

... silver-mines were the richest in the world.[1498] Africa would furnish in abundance the ivory and the apes; for elephants were numerous in Mauritania,[1499] and on the west coast,[14100] in ancient times; and the gorilla[14101] and the Barbary ape are well-known African products. Africa may also have produced the "peacocks," if tukkiyim are really "peacocks," though they are not found there at the present day. Or the tukkiyim may have been Guinea-fowl—a ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson

... Judged by this test, it is as old as the oldest of the unmistakable drift implements, the so-called Chellean (from Chelles in the department of Seine-et-Marne in France). The jaw by itself would suggest a gorilla, being both chinless and immensely powerful. The teeth, however, are human beyond question, and can be matched, or perhaps even in respect to certain marks of primitiveness out-matched, amongst ancient skulls of the Neanderthal order, ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett

... and attainment to the highest possible mark. To be sure, we are working in the dark. We do not know, not even if we are Huxley do we know, at what point in the grand, universal scale we shall ultimately come in. We know, or think we know, about how far below us stand the gorilla and the seal. We patronize them kindly for learning to turn hand-organs or eat from porringers. Let us hope that, if we have brethren of higher races on other planets, they will be as generously appreciative of our little all when we have done it; but, meanwhile, let us never be deterred from ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson

... panther, as he came forward along the main deck. He appeared like a man always ready to get a death hold upon a nearby enemy, both wary and using unceasing watchfulness. This was evident in the crouching gait of his powerful figure. His arms had the loose forward swing of a gorilla's, ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt

... are, if my memory serves me—you will check the observation, Professor Summerlee—some thirty-six species of monkeys, but the anthropoid ape is unknown. It is clear, however, that he exists in this country, and that he is not the hairy, gorilla-like variety, which is never seen out of Africa or the East." (I was inclined to interpolate, as I looked at him, that I had seen his first cousin in Kensington.) "This is a whiskered and colorless type, the latter characteristic pointing to the fact that he spends ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle

... and when that pale-eyed young man, in a fit of confidence, one night, with a very red face drew back the curtain from his grand "Fall of Chapultepec," and watched him with a lean and hungry look, Knowles, who knew no more about painting than a gorilla, walked about, looking through his fist at it, saying, "how fine the chiaroscuro was, and that it was a devilish good thing altogether." "Well, well," he soothed his conscience, going down-stairs, "maybe ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various

... as above. When he has been asked the question about half a dozen times in the course of a day, he is liable to become suspicious, and if his questioner is within range Schmitt stares at him for a few seconds in an absent-minded way, then an arm like that of a gorilla shoots out, and the quizzer (Untersucher) receives a resounding box on the ears to the huge delight of his companions. The old man then permits his iron-lipped mouth to relax into a caustic smile, after which he is left in peace for ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon

... me into all the charms of Pisan society. He had organized a little choir of ladies of rank, remarkable for their intelligence and beauty, and had taught them to sing extempore to the guitar. He had had them instructed by the famous Gorilla, who was crowned poetess-laureate at the capitol by night, six years later. She was crowned where our great Italian poets were crowned; and though her merit was no doubt great, it was, nevertheless, more tinsel than gold, and not ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... playfulness of the tailed apes and the mutual attachment which reigns in the families of chimpanzees also are familiar to the general reader. And if we find among the highest apes two species, the orang-outan and the gorilla, which are not sociable, we must remember that both—limited as they are to very small areas, the one in the heart of Africa, and the other in the two islands of Borneo and Sumatra have all the appearance of being the last remnants of formerly much more numerous species. The gorilla at ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin

... living skeleton, a thin, long, melancholy man sitting on a chair, in limp tights, showing his bony knees; the educated pig, that did astonishing things at the bidding of Madame Marve; and the Descent of Man, represented by several monkeys of varying sizes, a gorilla, ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson

... the pain of the fear of death. He who will conquer pain and terror will become himself a god. Then there will be a new life, a new man; everything will be new... then they will divide history into two parts: from the gorilla to the annihilation of God, and from the annihilation of ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... not tenantless. Someone was there. A huge man-like form, a monstrous gorilla, the evil spirit that haunted the forest, bent and gray and old-looking, was picking the things about, sniffing at them, turning ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... earth. That Word, you scoff at it, you men, although you well know that all visible works, societies, monuments, deeds, passions, proceed from the breath of your own feeble word, and that without that word you would resemble the African gorilla, the nearest approach to man, the Negro. You believe firmly in Number and in Motion, a force and a result both inexplicable, incomprehensible, to the existence of which I may apply the logical dilemma which, ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac

... he ran to the city and went straight to the courthouse to report the robbery to the magistrate. The Judge was a Monkey, a large Gorilla venerable with age. A flowing white beard covered his chest and he wore gold-rimmed spectacles from which the glasses had dropped out. The reason for wearing these, he said, was that his eyes had been weakened by the work of ...
— The Adventures of Pinocchio • C. Collodi—Pseudonym of Carlo Lorenzini

... observer of the close constitutional relationship between man and the ape, which of all the Mammals comes nearest him. Comparative anatomy, with its deeper vision, showed that all differences in bodily structure between man and the Anthropoidea (gorilla, chimpanzee, orang) are less important than the corresponding differences in bodily structure between these anthropoid apes and the lower apes. The phylogenetic significance of this fact, first emphasised by ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel

... differences, why are they incompetent to effect changes in the direction of a diminution of the jaw or teeth? And if use and disuse are the sole modifying agents in the case of the human jaw, why should men have any more chin than a gorilla or a dog? ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball

... made but a poor zigzag progress from the gorilla; Christianity, just now engaged in blessing the rival banners of warriors setting out for one another's throats, has failed ignominiously to bring the wolf in man to baptism, when the central state of Christian Europe must arm to the teeth one in every eighteen ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... myself as at that moment. My stature seemed to increase from an even six feet to something like twelve, and my bulk became elephantine. She was so slender, so lissom, so weak, and I so gargantuan, so gorilla-like, so heavy-handed! And I had come gaily up to crush her! What a fine figure of a man ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon

... namely that Rezu had never succeeded in getting his arms round him, since he was quite certain that if he had he would have broken him "as a baboon breaks a mealie-stalk." No strength, not even his, could have resisted the iron might of that huge, gorilla-like man. ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard

... an evil-appearing savage with every mark of brutal degeneracy writ large upon his bestial countenance. To Jane Clayton he looked more gorilla than human. He tried to converse with her, but without success, and finally he called to ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... gathering Austrich feathers.'' The boy who propounded this evidently had much of the stock in trade required for the popular etymologist. "Ireland is called the Emigrant Isle because it is so beautiful and green.'' "Gorilla warfare was where men rode on gorillas.'' "The Puritans found an insane asylum in the wilds ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley

... his gorilla-like arms, but let them drop helplessly again. "How did they get into the safe? Did you leave ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony

... quite possible that in animals like the tiger and lion the force would equal 1700 or 1800 pounds. The anthropoid apes can easily break a cocoanut with their teeth, and Guyot-Daubes thinks that possibly a gorilla has a jaw-force of 200 pounds. A human adult is said to exert a force of from 45 to 65 pounds between his teeth, and some individuals exceed this average as much as 100 pounds. In Buffon's experiments ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... humour, and enriched with many passages that showed a high and courageous spirit. His scathing denunciations of the system of brutality practised towards the political prisoners in Kilmainham gaol, and his picture of Mr. Governor Price as "the old gorilla," will long be remembered. One portion of his remarks ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown

... his paper, arose, and exclaimed: "Madam, hereafter when you travel, leave that young gorilla at home. Hitherto, I always thought that the old prophet was very cruel for calling the bears to kill the children for making sport of his head, but now I am forced to believe that he did a Christian act. If your boy ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard

... lips and try to utter connected notes." [How on earth do we know what it is trying to do?] "In their native state they (apes) form societies and obey a chief." [The old fallacy of metaphors adverted to in relation to ants and dogs.] Yet "no animal has ever learned to speak," "no chimpanzee or gorilla has ever been known to fashion any implement." [67] Their nearest approach to invention is in the building of huts or nests, in which they "are very inferior to most species of birds, to say nothing of insects." On the other hand, "as regards tool-making, no human race is known which ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... weighs about the same as a man, but its brain weighs only a pound, against three pounds for a man. Give a gorilla a brain weighing fifty ounces, and he would be a Methodist Presiding Elder. Give him a brain the same size of Edison's, say fifty-seven ounces, and instead of spending life in hunting for snakes and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard

... The baby gorilla, of the family called Ape, Is very like you in size and in shape, But he lives in the jungle with black hair for clothes And he gets very ...
— Animal Children - The Friends of the Forest and the Plain • Edith Brown Kirkwood

... the hand a true hand, in anatomical structure. The face, hands, and feet have mainly lost the covering of hair. They have no tail, or rather its rudiments are concealed beneath the skin. These include the gibbon, the orang, the gorilla, ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler

... Old Heck while it called out a suppressed snicker from the cowboys who were with Dorsey and the loafers in the pool-room. The bull-like guffaw of Mike Sabota, the gorilla-built, half-Greek proprietor of the Amusement Parlor roared out above the ripple of laughter from the others. The racing feud between the Y-Bar and the Quarter Circle KT was well known to all and Sabota himself had cleaned up a neat sum when the black horse from the Vermejo ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman

... to concentrate my attention upon my incomparable wife," said Challenger, passing his short, thick arm round her waist. Picture a gorilla and a gazelle, and you have the pair of them. "Come, come, these gentlemen are tired from the journey, and luncheon should ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle

... ferry crossing the river she had not yet made up her mind. Jim had no mind to make up. He was reduced to a mere waiter on her orders. He laughed at himself. This morning at daybreak he had been reproaching himself for being a vicious gorilla who had carried off a little girl; now he was realizing that the little girl had carried him off and was making a ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes

... Farrel removed the ink, and when Loustalot moved to another ink-well, Farrel's hand closed over that. Helpless and desperate, Loustalot suddenly began to weep; uttering peculiar mewing cries, he clutched at Farrel with the fury of a gorilla. Don Mike merely dodged round the desk, and continued to dodge until out of the tail of his eye, he saw the sheriff enter the bank and stop at the cashier's desk. Loustalot, blinded with tears of rage, failed to see Don Nicolas; he had vision only for Don ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne

... are right, captain," answered Tom. "I saw a gorilla in a menagerie, and it was exactly like that beast. But what a big fellow ...
— The Rover Boys on Land and Sea - The Crusoes of Seven Islands • Arthur M. Winfield

... who doubted Mr. Du Chaillu's first book; it certainly renews in the reader of the present work the satisfaction felt in the comparative reasonableness of the things narrated, and his consequent ability to put an unmurmuring trust in the author. Here, indeed, is very little of the gorilla whom we formerly knew: his ferocity is greatly abated; he only once beats his breast and roars; he does not twist gun-barrels; his domestic habits are much simplified; his appearance here is relatively as unimportant as Mr. Pendennis's in the "Newcomes"; he is a deposed hero; and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various

... this single-handed twirling or not must remain a matter of doubt, but we may rest assured that in the quarter-staff we have, probably, the earliest form of offensive weapon next to the handy stone. If Darwin is correct, we can easily imagine one of our gorilla ancestors picking up a big branch of a tree with which to hit some near member of his family. This, to my mind, would be playing elementary quarter-staff, and the game would have advanced a step if the assaulted ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn

... and weighed close to two hundred, but Wade was another two inches taller and weighed a good fifty pounds more. His arms and chest were built on the same general plan as those of a gorilla. He had good reason to call ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell

... going to New York to live, I had explored the Eden Musee. One of the most gruesome of the spectacles which I had seen in its famed Chamber of Horrors was a representation of a gorilla, holding in its arms the gory body of a woman. It was that impression which now revived in my mind. But by a process strictly in accordance with Darwin's theory, the Eden Musee gorilla had become a man—in appearance not unlike the beast that had inspired my distorted thought. This man held a bloody ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers

... an improved monkey. Darwin's theory certainly gives to both some vastly remote common ancestor; but it does not maintain the metamorphosis of one into the other. It does not suppose that man was once a gorilla. It supposes that from out of some of the differentiations of some animal form arose the first man-like creature, and that, gradually changing, like other animal forms, some of the varieties eventually evolved into apes and orangoutangs, to stop ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various

... served a morning's meal to the hungry sharks held as fetich by the natives along the stream, who yearly sacrifice young girls reared for the purpose to their propitiation; now scouring the bush in pursuit of the gorilla or shooting hippopotami by the half-dozen, and other adventures and exploits wherein duty, excitement, and gratified curiosity were intermingled with danger and hairbreadth escape that few would ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various

... them to the light in his enormous hand, which was hairy as a gorilla's. "I can see no difference. Gar! you'll be a mighty useful brother, I'm thinking! We can do with a bad man or two among us, Friend McMurdo: for there are times when we have to take our own part. We'd soon ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... 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. ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... all right, and a genuine wild man of the woods!" he remarked. "What are the circus fellows thinkin' of, to let such a fine chance slip by to get a real 'What-is-it,' fresh from the jungles of Borneo, half man, and the rest gorilla?" ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Afloat • George A. Warren

... facilitate the children's studies, he presented them with an engraved geography which represented various scenes of the world: cannibals with feather head-dresses, a gorilla kidnapping a young girl, Arabs in the desert, a whale ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert

... but without mercy. To be able to work like that, so certainly, with so sure a touch, and to look like a Greek god! Wilson's only rival, a gynecologist named O'Hara, got results, too; but he sweated and swore through his operations, was not too careful as to asepsis, and looked like a gorilla. ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... this case and will report later. Yours truly!' That's all—keep the change—we make a livin' off of suckers—and they's one born every minute. To hell with these detectives! Well, I never received nothin' more and finally I jumped at a poor little bandy-legged sheep-herder, a cross between a gorilla and a Digger Injun—scared him to death. But I pulled my freight quick before we had any international complications. Don't mention Mr. Allan Q. Rinkerton to me, boy, or I'll throw a fit. Say," he said, changing the subject abruptly, "how many hundred thousand ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge

... is that he was born out of wedlock. This great disability could have been surmounted in America, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, or, in fact, anywhere but in England. The law of the natural child in this country would bring a blush to the cheek of a gorilla. But neither Church nor State will lift a finger to ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts

... Cave, and the human skeleton found near Dusseldorf in a cavern, we think it would not be difficult to find full as bad skulls on living shoulders, and equally bad forms in skeletons now walking about. To us they are no evidence that the first man was a gorilla or a chimpanzee, nor does his or Darwin's argument convince us that all vertebrates were once fishes. This question, however, is still mooted; and we have no objections that people should amuse themselves in thus tracing back ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... GORILLAS; A thrilling story of adventure in darkest Africa. Don is carried over a mighty waterfall into the heart of gorilla land. ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout - or, The Speediest Car on the Road • Victor Appleton

... tone is pretty short on sweetness and light, and I do not see why Grogan, who looks something like a gorilla's mother-in-law, takes such guff from a beanpole ...
— The Flying Cuspidors • V. R. Francis

... "For that ugly old gorilla!" exclaimed the girl, unceremoniously and disdainfully. "I can get better-looking lovers than either a monkey or a Swab, I'd have you to ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg

... are—I will not call them false friends—this noun should never follow that adjective. To what shall I liken them—to the young gorilla, that even while its master is feeding it, looks trustingly in his face and thrusts forth its paw to tear him? Who blames the gorilla? Torn from its dam, caged or chained, it owes its captor a grudge. To the serpent? The story of ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various

... 'Ware shoal!" when once Otoo went into action. I shall never forget what he did to Bill King. It occurred in German Samoa. Bill King was hailed the champion heavyweight of the American navy. He was a big brute of a man, a veritable gorilla, one of those hard-hitting, rough-housing chaps, and clever with his fists as well. He picked the quarrel, and he kicked Otoo twice and struck him once before Otoo felt it to be necessary to fight. I don't think it lasted four minutes, at the end of which time Bill ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine

... ourselves enabled to answer those who maintain, that if Mr. Darwin's theory of the Origin of Species is true, man too must change in form, and become developed into some other animal as different from his present self as he is from the Gorilla or the Chimpanzee; and who speculate on what this form is likely to be. But it is evident that such will not be the case; for no change of conditions is conceivable, which will render any important alteration of his form and organization so universally useful and necessary to ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace

... waists on the pons asinorum, and see the stream of mathematics flow beneath. We will take refuge in cards, and play at "beggar my neighbor," not abuse my neighbor. We will go to the Zoological Gardens and talk freely about the gorilla and his kindred, but not talk about people who can talk in their turn. Suppose we praise the High Church? we offend the Low Church. The Broad Church? High and Low are both offended. What do you think of Lord ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... of eventide, Gracefully festooned with myrtle, In her sampan she would glide Forth to spear the snapping turtle; And her voice was blinding sweet, Piercing as the parrakeet, Fruity as old Manzanilla, With a soupcon of the bleat Of the African gorilla. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 10, 1917 • Various



Words linked to "Gorilla" :   Gorilla gorilla beringei, pongid, silverback, Gorilla gorilla grauri, Gorilla gorilla, Gorilla gorilla gorilla



Copyright © 2024 e-Free Translation.com