Some idea of the manner in which elephants fought in battle is given by Cæsar:—
“A wounded elephant, furious with rage, attacked an unarmed follower of the troops, and, kneeling upon him, crushed the life out of his body. A veteran of the fifth legion rushed forward to attack the beast, who was roaring, and lashing with his proboscis. The elephant immediately forsook his victim, and, catching up the soldier in his trunk, whirled him in the air. But the intrepid warrior did not lose his presence of mind: he wounded the elephant in his sensitive proboscis, till, exhausted with pain, he dropped the soldier, and fled in terror to his companions.”
The elephant was probably not used to any extent in war by the Romans, after the establishment of the imperial government. In A.D. 193, we read that Rome was filled with horses and elephants, ready for use in the proposed war between Didius Julianus and Septimius Severus. In the famous battle between Alexander Severus and Artaxerxes (A.D. 230), three hundred elephants were taken from the Persians, and a number marched to Rome in solemn state. The introduction of new appliances of war, and the successful attempts in routing bodies of elephants, probably did much to render them unpopular, for a time at least, among the Roman conquerors.
CHAPTER XXV.
PROBOSCIDIAN FICTIONS.
In the history of nearly all animals, there will be found associated some curious fiction.
In Burmah and Siam, the white elephant is supposed, by some, to be the abode of a transmigratory Buddha; and in India, certain elephants with a single right tusk are reverenced. In China, the tusks of the mammoth are used in medicine; and in some of the old works, the mammoth itself is described as a huge rat, which lives under the ground in burrows, formed by the tusks, or teeth. The origin of this fable lies in the fact, that, as mammoths were always found beneath the surface, it was assumed, that, when alive, they lived there. Early anatomists stated that the elephant’s head was a storehouse for the water which it blew out of its trunk.
It was formerly believed that elephants shed their tusks, as do deer their horns. Ælian says that they drop them once in ten years, which, all things considered, is quite often enough. Pliny repeats the story, but adds some private information of his own, to the effect that they always hid their tusks underground.
This curious error has found its way into many comparatively modern works: thus, Sir William Jardine states, in the naturalist’s library, that “the tusks are shed about the twelfth or the tenth year.”
Many strange beliefs were entertained regarding the elephant of Ceylon. Travellers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Pyrard, Bernier, and Phillipe, stated that this elephant was the superior of all others in India, both physically and mentally; and Tavernier is supposed to be authority for the statement, that, if a Ceylon elephant be introduced among others, the latter will instinctively do him homage by touching the ground with their trunks.