Inelastic excitation of giant resonances has been studied in 172 MeV ..cap alpha.. scattering from /sup 208/Pb at scattering angles of 1.5/sup 0/--8/sup 0/. Fine structures in the region of the giant monopole and quadrupole resonances indicate multipolarities also different from L = 0 and 2. The isoscalar L = 0 and 2 strengths in the giant resonance region yield (90 +- 20) % and (70 +- 20) % of the corresponding energy weighted sum rule limit. This is consistent with other hadron scattering results, with higher energy electron scattering, and with microscopic random phase approximation results. However, the strength for L = 2 excitations is significantly larger than extracted from lower energy electron scattering. Fine structures observed are compared with high resolution (p,p') and (e,e') results. At scattering angles 5/sup 0/--8/sup 0/ new structures have been observed at E/sub x/ = 12.5 and 16.0 MeV consistent with multipolarities L = 4 and 6. Together with the contribution of higher multipolarity extracted at lower excitation energies from the angular distributions of giant monopole and quadrupole excitations, this indicates rather broad distributions of 2h..omega.. L = 4 and 6 excitations with centroid energies of 12.2 and 13.7 MeV and widths ofmore » 4.5 and 7.8 MeV, respectively. The extracted sum rule strengths for L = 4 and 6 are in the order of 30% in each case. In the region of the giant monopole resonance evidence for additional L = 2 excitation was found (< or =14% energy weighted sum rule strength).« less