Let the fact of the {25} occurrence of occasional, severe droughts in the country which that animal has inhabited be granted.

In that case, when the ground vegetation has been consumed, and the trees alone remain, it is plain that at such times only those individuals (of what we assume to be the nascent giraffe species) which were able to reach high up would be preserved, and would become the parents of the following generation, some individuals of which would, of course, inherit that high-reaching power which alone preserved their parents.

Only the high-reaching issue of these high-reaching individuals would again, _caeteris paribus_, be preserved at the next drought, and would again transmit to their offspring their still loftier stature; and so on, from period to period, through aeons of time, all the individuals tending to revert to the ancient shorter type of body, being ruthlessly destroyed at the occurrence of each drought.
(1.) But against this it may be said, in the first place, that the argument proves too much; for, on this supposition, many species must have tended to undergo a similar modification, and we ought to have at least several forms, similar to the giraffe, developed from different Ungulata.[20] A careful observer of animal life, who has long resided in South Africa, explored the interior, and lived in the giraffe country, has assured the Author that the giraffe has powers of locomotion and endurance fully equal to those possessed by any of the other Ungulata of that continent.

It would seem, therefore, that some of these other Ungulates ought to have developed in a similar manner as to the neck, under pain of being starved, when the long neck of the giraffe was in its incipient stage.
To this criticism it has been objected that different kinds of animals are preserved, in the struggle for life, in very different ways, and even {26} that "high reaching" may be attained in more modes than one--as, for example, by the trunk of the elephant.

This is, indeed, true, but then none of the African Ungulata[21] have, nor do they appear ever to have had, any proboscis whatsoever; nor have they acquired such a development as to allow them to rise on their hind limbs and graze on trees in a kangaroo-attitude, nor a power of climbing, nor, as far as known, any other modification tending to compensate for the comparative shortness of the neck.