The Wild Elephant and the Method of Capturing and Taming it in Ceylon

THE WILD ELEPHANT.
LONDON PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO. NEW-STREET SQUARE
AN ELEPHANT CORRAL.
BY SIR J. EMERSON TENNENT, Bart. K.C.S. LL.D. F.R.S. &c. AUTHOR OF “CEYLON, AN ACCOUNT OF THE ISLAND, PHYSICAL, HISTORICAL, AND TOPOGRAPHICAL,” ETC. LONDON: LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 1867.
TO MY INTELLIGENT COMPANION IN MANY OF THE JOURNEYS THROUGHOUT THE MOUNTAINS AND FORESTS OF CEYLON, IN THE COURSE OF WHICH MUCH OF THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS VOLUME WAS COLLECTED; TO MAJOR SKINNER, CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF ROADS AND PUBLIC WORKS, ETC., ETC. ONE OF THE MOST EXPERIENCED AND VALUABLE SERVANTS OF THE CROWN; IT IS INSCRIBED, IN THE HOPE THAT IT MAY RECALL TO HIM THE PLEASANT MEMORIES WHICH IT AWAKES IN ME.

Professor Schlegel of Leyden, in a paper lately submitted by him to the Royal Academy of Sciences of Holland, (the substance of which he obligingly communicated to me, through Baron Bentinck the Netherlands Minister at this Court), confirmed the identity of the Ceylon elephant with that found in the Lampongs of Sumatra. The osteological comparison of which Temminck has given the results was, he says, conducted by himself with access to four skeletons of the latter; and the more recent opportunity of comparing a living Sumatran elephant with one from Bengal, served to establish other though minor points of divergence. The Indian species is more robust and powerful; the proboscis longer and more slender; and the extremity, (a point in which the elephant of Sumatra resembles that of Africa,) is more flattened and provided with coarser and longer hair than that of India.

Professor Schlegel, adverting to the large export of elephants from Ceylon to the Indian continent, which has been carried on from time immemorial, suggests the caution with which naturalists, in investigating this question, should first satisfy themselves whether the elephants they examine are really natives of the mainland, or whether they have been brought to it from the islands. “The extraordinary fact,” he observes in his letter to me, “of the identity thus established between the elephants of Ceylon and Sumatra, and the points in which they are found to differ from that of Bengal, leads to the question whether all the elephants of the Asiatic continent belong to one single species; or whether these vast regions may not produce in some quarter as yet unexplored the one hitherto found only in the two islands referred to? It is highly desirable that naturalists who have the means and opportunity, should exert themselves to discover, whether any traces are to be found of the Ceylon elephant in the Dekkan; or of that of Sumatra in Cochin China or Siam.”