The winners in life's race

by Arabella B. Buckley

A Buffalo cow defending her calf.—(Livingstone.)

Here then we can have no branching as in the stag, but on the other hand a firm and terrible weapon increasing from year to year; and even the king of the beasts, the lion, when he attacks a large buffalo, is often seriously wounded for his pains. We should not wonder then if these animals had conquered the world wherever man had not destroyed them; but strange to say, they have kept chiefly to the old world, for none have travelled to South America, and only the Bisons have overrun North America with their vast herds. All the rest, buffaloes, wild cattle, antelopes, gazelles, goats and sheep, have made their home in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and a fine time they must have had of it when all Europe was one field of undulating plains and dense forests, and the ancestors of our cattle crashed through the tangled bushes, drank by the silent rivers, or grazed on the wild rough herbage. Then, where town and villages now stand, there must have been scenes such as travellers still relate of Central Africa, where amid dense jungle, magnificent forests, and flat marshy grounds,

“... the elephant browses at peace in his wood,

And the river-horse gambols unscared in the flood,

And the mighty rhinoceros wallows at will,

In the fen where the wild ass is drinking his fill.”

There the huge buffaloes come down in troops out of the forest to drink, while the great hippopotamuses leave their watery bed to feed on the rough grass of the swamps. Not far off, a herd of zebras comes galloping by to drink lower down in the river, startling the large antelopes feeding quietly in the soft green pasture above, for they know that this is the hour when the lions are abroad and will fall upon any straggler with tooth and nail, while the distant howling of the hyænas shows that they would not be far behind in seizing upon any weak or wounded animal. But little does the heavy rhinoceros care for all this as he too tramps slowly along on his way to drink, for with his size and defences he runs but little risk of attack. Thus all the country is alive with large milk-givers, and we realise that when they ruled all over the world, as they still do in Africa, they too must have had their time of triumph and greatness like the great fish or the monster reptiles.

But hush! as we watch this scene a heavy thud, thud, strikes upon our ear, like the tramping of heavy troops upon soft ground. It is the “lords of the forest,” the large Elephants, which, after feeding all day in the shady jungle, are coming down to drink and bathe. What, then, is the history of these huge antiquated animals that they have not come into our story as yet? The reason is this: as they stand alone now with their huge flapping ears, their column-like legs and feet, and their long grasping trunk, so they have stood apart from the hoofed animals almost as long as we have any knowledge of them. So far as we can judge by their skeleton, especially the shoulder blade, they come nearer to the gnawers, or rodents, than to any of the large vegetable-feeders. Their legs are awkward and their gait clumsy, for the thigh bones are enormously long and thick, and the toes are enclosed in a thick pad with only the nails to mark them; but above all it is the head and mouth which make so strange a figure. Look at the huge forehead, showing a skull of immense size. This skull would be far too heavy to carry if it were not full of hollows, making a large framework to bear the tusks of smooth white ivory, which grow out from the upper jaw to a length of more than six feet on each side,[172] and weigh sometimes from eighty to one hundred pounds. Surely a wonderful size for teeth, and we shall not wonder that they are the only front teeth that the elephant has, and that they go on growing all his life from a permanent pulp, like the gnawing teeth of the rodents. But if he opens his mouth you will see that, besides these, he has at the back huge flat grinders, one, or never more than two, at a time on each side; but those are monsters, with hard enamelled ridges for grinding his food. During his lifetime of about a hundred years the elephant grows six of these teeth on each side, twenty-four in all, the new ones growing up at the back and pushing forward as the old ones wear away.

Fig. 72.