Elephant harnessed in a keddah. From an original drawing, by Mr. Corse Scott, engraved in Brewster's Encyclopædia.

CHAPTER V.

African Elephant. Elephas Africanus. CUVIER.*

BEFORE the settlement of the Portuguese on the coasts of Africa, in the latter part of the fifteenth From an elephant in the Menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes

century, the elephant ranged without much interruption on the banks of the great rivers, whose courses, even at our own days, have not been completely traced. In the plains of the kingdom of Congo, where the herbage attains a wild luxuriance amid innumerable lakes, and on the borders of the Senegal, whose waters run through exten. sive forests, herds of elephants had wandered for ages in security. The poor African, indeed, occasionally destroyed a few stragglers, to obtain a rare and luxurious feast of the more delicate parts of their flesh; and the desire for ornament, which prevails even in the rudest forms of savage life, rendered the chiefs of the native hordes anxious to possess the trunk of the elephant, to convert it into armlets and other fanciful embellishments of their persons. Superstition, too, occasionally prompted the destruction of this powerful animal for the tail of the elephant had become an object of reverence, and therefore of distinction to its possessor: and the huntsman accordingly devoted himself, with as much ferocity as the hymena-dog that gnaws off the tail of the ox and the sheep during their unprotracted repose, to steal upon the unsuspecting elephant in his pasture, and to cut off his tail with a single stroke of his rugged hatchet. But these were irregular and partial incentives to the destruction of the most mighty, and, at the same time, the most peaceful inhabitant of the woods. The steady and inexorable demands of commerce had not yet come to the shores of Africa, to raise up enemies to him in all the tribes among whom he had so long lived in a state of comparative security. The trade in ivory had been suspended

for more than a thousand years. There were pe. riods, indeed, in the history of the refined nations of antiquity, when this destruction of the elephant was as great as in modern times: when África yielded her tributes of elephants' teeth to the kings of Persia ;* when the people of Judæa built "ivory palaces;" when the galleys of Tyre had "benches of ivory;"‡ when, contributing to the barbarous luxury of the early Grecian princes,

"The spoils of elephants the roofs inlay ;"§ when the Etruscan attributes of royalty were sceptres and thrones of ivory ;|| when the ancient kings and magistrates of Rome sat in ivory seats; when colossal ivory statues of their gods, far exceeding, in their vast proportions and their splendid ornaments, all the magnificence of the moderns, were raised by the Greeks of the age of Pericles; and when immense stores of ivory, to be employed with similar prodigality, were collected in the temples.** In the time of Pliny, the vast consumption of ivory for articles of luxury had compelled the Romans to seek for it in another hemisphere; Africa had ceased to furnish elephants' tusks, except of the smallest kind.tt A century or two earlier, according to Polybius, ivory was so plentiful in Africa, that the tribes on the confines of Ethiopia em. ployed elephants' tusks as doorposts, and for the palisades that enclosed their fields.‡‡ When the Roman power fell into decay, and the commerce of

* Herodotus, Thalia. merce for what are more substance of ivory. + Psalm xlv., 8. Odyssey, lib. iv., v. 73.

T Ibid., lib. v., cap. iv.

Elephant's teeth is the name in comaccurately called défenses or tusks-the

Ezek. xxvii., 6.

Dio. Halicar., lib. iii., cap. 18. **Cicero de Signis, par. 46.

tt Hist Nat., lib. viii., cap. 2. ‡‡ See Plin., lib. viii., cap. 10.

Europe with Africa was nearly suspended for cen. turies, the elephant was again unmolested in those regions. He was no longer slaughtered to admin. ister to the pomp of temples, or to provide ornaments for palaces. The ivory tablets of the citi zens of ancient Rome (libri elephantini) had fallen into disuse; and the toys of modern France were constructed of less splendid materials.* At Angola, elephants' teeth had become so plentiful, because so useless as an article of trade, that in the beginning of the seventeenth century, according to Andrew Battell, an Englishman who served in the Portuguese armies, the natives "had their idols of wood in the midst of their town, fashioned like a negro, and at the foot thereof was a great heap of elephants' teeth, containing three or four tuns of them: these were piled in the earth, and upon them were set the sculls of dead men, which they had slain in the wars, in monument of their victory."+ The people of Angola and Congo, when the Portuguese first established themselves there, were found to have preserved an immense number of elephants' teeth for centuries, and had applied them to such superstitious uses. As long as any part of the stock remained, the vessels of Portugal carried large quantities to Europe; and this traffic formed one of the most profitable branches of the early trade with Africa. About the middle of the seventeenth century the store was exhausted. But the demand for ivory, which had been thus renewed in Europe after the lapse of so many centuries, of

* Dieppe has been for several centuries the great manufacto. ry of ivory ornaments.

+Purchas, book vii., chap. 9.

M