isting species are evidently adapted to live in hot climates; for, with the exception of a few hairs on the legs and 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

* Phil. Trans.

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 con-
veyed to us with a finer effect than if we had been
on shore."*
The elephant also possesses the pow.
er of ejecting from his trunk water and dust, and
his own saliva, over every part of his body. "Na-
ture 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 fre-
quently 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 dexteri-
ty." 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."

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.

* Journal, vol. i., p. 182.
† Oriental Sports.

Curse of Kehama, xiii.

The ancients, according to Philostratus, were inclined to think that the elephant lived more than four hundred years. They founded this belief pon 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 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 shows that the Author of Nature intended that his abode upon 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 about 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.

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 germes of the molar teeth; and from the pe

culiar conformation of these germes, 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.

Cheek teeth: A, of the Indian species; B, of the African. But the distinctions of the two species are evident enough without an examination of the molar teeth. Cuvier first pointed out, in 1795, the distinctive characters of their heads. In the Indian species the summit of the head forms a sort of pyramid; in the African it is almost round. The front of the head in the Indian species is concave; in the African it is somewhat convex. There are many other

differences in the structure of the head, which are highly interesting to comparative anatomists, but which we could not easily point out without the use of scientific terms. The general differences will be readily seen by a comparison of the two sculls.

The most striking difference of each species is, however, exhibited in the dimensions of the ears. In the Indian elephant the ear is of a moderate size; in the African it is enormous, and covers the shoulder. In the cabinet of the King of Denmark there