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infested that delightful country, he passed along the bank of a river, and was charmed with a delicious odour which its waters diffused in their course. He was eager to view the source of so fragrant a stream, but was informed by the natives that it flowed from the temples of an elephant, immensely large, milkwhite, and beautifully formed; that he governed a numerous race of elephants; and the odoriferous fluid which exuded from his temples had formed the river *", This fable was probably one of the many modes in which Hinduism reverenced the reproductive power of Nature. A singular circumstance is mentioned by Mr. Cowper Rose,-that the natives of Africa often find a piece of wood in the elephant's head, to which they attach great value as a charm. Mr. Rose does not seem to have been acquainted with the uses of the gland just described, but his narrative explains the manner in which the wood enters the head-for enter it must. "I sat on one (a dead elephant) while they searched for the wood in his head. It lies about an inch beneath the skin, imbedded in fat, just above the eye, and has the appearance of a thorn, or a small piece of twig broken off. Some are without it; and on examining the spot minutely, we found that there was a small opening in the skin,-a large pore it may be; and I conceive that this phenomenon is simply accounted for by the twig breaking in this hole when the animal is in the act of rubbing his head against the bushes †.”

The skin of the existing species of elephant has very little hair upon it; a fossil specimen has been found, in which the hair was very thick. The existing species are evidently adapted to live in hot climates; for with the exception of a few hairs on the legs, and

* Wilford, in Asiatic Researches, vol. iii.
t Four Years in Southern Africa, p. 236,

on the crown of the head, the animal has no covering over his skin to protect him from cold. The same deficiency makes him very sensible to heat, and particularly careful to defend himself from the annoyances of insects. The skin is generally smooth and soft; and becomes hard and knotty from disease, produced, probably, by an uncongenial temperature. Mr. P. Blair, in the account of his dissection of the Dundee elephant, says, "the cuticula was covered all over with a strange sort of scab, like short pieces of whalebone, much divided, but adhering fast: they were from one-sixteenth to one-sixth of an inch in length. I take them to be a distemper from the coldness of the climate *." The inconvenience of this want of hair, in hot climates, is lessened by the disposition of the animal to bathe. Bishop Heber has described this habit of the elephant, as he observed the enjoyment of a number upon his approach to Dacca :"At the distance of about half a mile from these desolate palaces, a sound struck my ear, as if from the water itself on which we were riding, the most solemn and singular I can conceive. It was long, loud, deep, and tremulous, something between the bellowing of a bull and the blowing of a whale, or perhaps most like those roaring buoys which are placed at the mouths of some English harbours, in which the winds make a noise, to warn ships off them. 'Oh,' said Abdallah, there are elephants bathing; Dacca much place for elephant.' I looked immediately, and saw about twenty of these fine animals, with their heads and trunks just appearing above the water. Their bellowing it was which I had heard, and which the water conveyed to us with a finer effect than if we had been on shore t." The elephant also possesses the power of ejecting from his trunk, water and Journal vol.i. p. 182.

6

* Phil. Trans.

dust, and his own saliva, over every part of his body. "Nature has provided the elephant with means to cool its heated surface, by enabling it to draw from its throat, by the aid of its trunk, a copious supply of saliva, which the animal spirts with force very frequently all over its skin. It also grubs up dust, and blows it over its back and sides, to keep off the flies; and may often be seen fanning itself with a large bough, which it uses with great ease and dexterity *" Mr. Southey has described this habit of the elephant, in a natural state, in a passage of great beauty :

“Trampling his path through wood and brake,
And canes which crackling fall before his way,
And tassel-grass, whose silvery feathers play
O'ertopping the young trees,

On comes the elephant, to slake

His thirst, at noon, in yon pellucid springs.
Lo! from his trunk upturn'd, aloft he flings
The grateful shower and now

Plucking the broad-leav'd bough
Of yonder plume, with waving motion slow,
Fanning the languid air,

He waves it to and fro †.

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As our knowledge of the growth of the elephant has been acquired from those which have either been bred, or born, in captivity, we shall reserve this portion of our subject for the next chapter.

The ancients, according to Philostratus, were inclined to think that the elephant lived more than four hundred years. They founded this belief upon the authority of a story of one with a particular mark having been captured by Juba, King of Lydia, four hundred years after a battle, in which the animal had fled to Mount Atlas. This is not grounded upon a sufficiently accurate chronology to command our belief. Tavernier appears to have

*Oriental Sports.

+ Curse of Kehama, xiii.

had tolerable evidence, from the accounts of the keepers of elephants in India, that particular individuals had been in captivity from one hundred to one hundred and thirty years. The elephant is, doubtless, a very long lived animal; and the provision for the renewal of its teeth shews that the Author of Nature intended that his abode on this earth should be, in comparison with other quadrupeds, and even with man, a prolonged existence. Pliny, upon the authority of Aristotle, states that the elephant lived two or three hundred years; and the Romans, in the time of Gordian, in the spirit of poetical exaggeration, chose an elephant for the symbol of eternity*.

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Sallengre Thesaurus, tom. iii. p. 212. The above, medal was struck in honour of Tranquillina, the wife of Gordian. Cuper thinks that the legend "Eternitas Aug." is expressive of a wish for the long continuance of the reign of the emperor as long even as the life of the elephant.

We are principally indebted to the accurate researches of Cuvier for the determination of the specific differences of the Indian and the African elephant. Neither Buffon nor Linnæus conceived that there was more than one species; and, until the time of Camper, the remarkable distinction in the structure of the teeth of the two species was entirely unobserved.

This distinction, to which, in all cases, naturalists properly attach great importance, may be observed in the germs of the molar teeth; and from the peculiar conformation of these germs, when the tooth has been used, its surface presents, in the Indian species, a series of narrow transverse ribands, of an equal size, whose edges are, as it were, scolloped; while in the African species the ribands assume a lozenge form,—that is, they are larger in the middle than at the ends, and the edges are rarely scolloped. The lamina being larger in the African species than in the Indian, a smaller number are required to form a tooth,-nine or ten uniting to complete a tooth of the one species as large as one composed of thirteen or fourteen laminæ in the other*.

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B

Cheek teeth: A, of the Indian species; B, of the African.

* Annales du Muséum, tom, viii. P. 123.

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