Among the natives of the elephant country, there are many curious superstitions concerning the age, death, and final resting-place of the great animal. The age to which they may possibly attain is a matter of conjecture. One hundred and fifty years is considered the limit by persons who are familiar with the subject. Expert native hunters state that they live one hundred and twenty years, or average about eighty. Mr. Sanderson expresses the belief that they attain one hundred and fifty years, and bases his conclusions from his observations of the famous elephant Bheemruttee, owned by his Highness the Mahárájah of Mysore. It was captured in Coorg in 1805, and was then a baby elephant three years old. In 1876 she was in her prime, and did not show any of the evidences of age evinced by elephants that were known to be advanced in years; and, when it is remembered that in captivity the animals are often ill-fed and abused, it is evident that they may attain a great age. Natives can determine the age of an Asiatic elephant within a few years. They easily ascertain that of a young or very old animal, but those of middle age present more difficulties. The head of an old elephant is lean and rugged, the bones of the skull being prominent, the eyes and temples sunken; while the fore-legs, instead of bulging out at the knees, present the same general size throughout. An old elephant also has a different gait from a young one: instead of putting the foot firmly upon the ground, the heel touches it first. The surest test to the native, however, is the ear, which is almost as conclusive a telltale as are the teeth of a horse. In elephants not older than seven years, the top of the ear is not turned over at the rim; but, as they grow older, it begins to lap and curve, increasing with age; and in very old animals, the lower portion is always torn and jagged. Elephants attain their full growth at about twenty-five years of age, and are in full vigor at thirty-five.
The Strologas, a tribe of the Billiga-rungun hills, assert and believe that the elephant never dies; while the Kurrabas of Kákankoté, and many others, are firm in the belief that they have some secret place to which they retire to die. When this idea is scouted as romance by a European, the native invariably asks, “Did you ever see a dead elephant? Did you ever hear of any one who did?” and the questioner and doubter is obliged generally to answer in the negative. Not only have few sportsmen found an elephant that had evidently died a natural death, but few natives have ever seen one.
In all his rambles, covering nearly twenty years in the heart of the elephant country, Mr. Sanderson never found an elephant that had died a natural death, nor did he ever meet with a professional native elephant-hunter who had, except during an epidemic among the animals in the Chittagong forest. This seems extremely remarkable when it is remembered that, while the flesh might be devoured, the bones and tusks would last a long time. The same belief is entertained by the wild tribes of Ceylon. Sir Emerson Tennent says, “The natives generally assert that the body of a dead elephant is seldom or never discovered in the woods, and certain it is, that frequenters of the forest with whom I had conversed, whether European or Singhalese, alike are consistent in their assurances that they have never found the remains of a dead elephant that had died a natural death. One chief, the Wanyyah of the Trincomalie district, told a friend of mine, that, once after a severe murrain which had swept the province, he found the carcasses of elephants that had died of the disease. On the other hand, a European gentleman, who for thirty-six years without intermission had been living in the jungle, ascending to the summits of mountains in the prosecution of the trigonometrical survey, and penetrating valleys in tracing roads, and opening means of communication,—one, too, who has made the habits of the wild elephant a subject of constant study and observation,—has often expressed to me his astonishment that, after seeing many thousands of living elephants in all possible situations, he had never yet found a single skeleton of a dead one, except those which had fallen by a rifle.” The Singhalese have a superstition in relation to the close of life in the elephant. They believe that, on feeling the approach of dissolution, he repairs to a solitary valley, and there resigns himself to death. A native who accompanied Mr. Cripps, when hunting in the forests of Anarájapoora, intimated to him that he was then in the immediate vicinity of the spot “to which the elephants come to die,” but that it was so mysteriously concealed, that, although every one believed in its existence, no one had ever succeeded in penetrating it. At the corral of Kornegalle in 1847, one of the Kandyan chiefs assured him that it was the universal belief of his countrymen, that the elephants, when about to die, resorted to a valley in an unknown spot among the mountains to the east of Adams Peak, which was reached by a narrow pass with walls of rock on each side, and that here, by the side of a lake of clear water, they took their last repose. While this belief is held by some natives of Continental India, there is not a spot in the elephant country that has not been penetrated by either Europeans or natives; yet the latter are not convinced, and the mystery as to what becomes of the dead elephants is as deep as ever. The elephants that die in captivity are victims to the same troubles that affect all animals, and the wild elephant is probably no exception. At the commissariat at Bengal, one hundred and fourteen elephants died in 1874-75. Eleven died of apoplexy, three of dysentery, five of inflammation of the lungs, thirteen of debility, one of cold, twenty-six of zahirbad, one of vomiting, three of colic, and one of congestion of the brain,—abundant proof to the superstitious native that the elephant is susceptible to dissolution. Ceylon elephants are remarkable for the numbers born without tusks. These are called mucknas, and differ in no other respect from the elephants of Continental India. They resemble ordinary females; the tusks being extremely small, and useless as defence. Sometimes they are larger than ordinary tuskers; but this may be mere accident, as is their dental defect, and it is not an hereditary trait. So rare is a good tusker in Ceylon, that one is looked upon as a curiosity. Sir Samuel Baker states that not over one in three hundred possessed them; and to show the difference between these and the continental elephant, out of one hundred and forty, fifty-one of which were males, captured by Mr. Sanderson in Mysore, Bengal, in 1874-76, only five were mucknas, or tuskless. We should expect to find theories at least to explain this strange difference in an adjoining country, where the climate and food conditions are almost identical (the food in Ceylon is easier to obtain); but I am not aware that any of importance have been expressed.
As large and powerful as the elephant is, it is easily dismayed and alarmed; and many have an especial aversion to small animals. Thus, some elephants have a great dislike for small dogs; and a mouse has been known to cause a large tusker to snort with fear. Wild hogs are particularly disagreeable to the great animals, and it appears that this was known to the ancients; as Procopius, the historian of the Persian and Gothic wars, states that at the siege of Edessa by Chosroes, the king of Persia, in the time of Justinian, the besieged Greeks imitated the cry of the pig to frighten the elephants of the enemy. In fact, elephants are like other animals. They have their likes and dislikes; and their alarm at a mouse, in justice to some of the human race, should not be used, as it often is, as an argument in proof of their supposed cowardice and lack of intelligence.
CHAPTER III.
THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE ELEPHANT.
In determining the intelligence of an animal, we naturally take ourselves as the type of mental excellence, and grade the lower animals as they approach us. Some would place the ant next to man, arguing that it more closely resembles him in its habits, customs, and methods of showing what we consider the result of intelligent action. It keeps domestic animals (aphis), goes to war in organized bodies, makes slaves of other insects, erects wonderful structures, is accredited with planting seeds, and certainly stores them up after arranging them so that they cannot sprout; in fact, appears to act in many ways like a rational human being: and, contrasted to it, the elephant, dog, horse, and beaver would seem to be comparatively stupid animals; at least, such would be the verdict of the observer who mistakes instinct for reason. Such a comparison seems unfair to the other animals mentioned; and to argue that the elephant is not as intelligent as the ant because it does not build a house, and lay up a food-supply, would hardly be just, as the great proboscidian does not require such shelter: and, without instancing any more examples, it would appear, that, to establish the relative intelligence of an animal, it should be judged, not especially by the standard of another, but according to its displayal of what we term thought; and this leads us to consider how thought may be exhibited in an animal. Instinctive action is something that is done without appreciable thought: thus, a colt instinctively kicks at an enemy, as a kitten spits at a dog. The fear of this animal has been present in all the generations of cats, and is inherited, as shown by the protest in the curve of the back, the raising of the tail, and other familiar methods of expression. So we may, without multiplying instances, consider that instinctive action is the outward expression of inherited experience, and has practically nothing in common with that action of the mind which we call thought. If this kitten when it grows older,—and I know of an instance,—should without instruction climb upon a door, and lift the latch, she would be exhibiting a practical illustration of the results of thought: in other words, she would lift the latch because she knew that the door could not be opened without it, and consequently had, in her feline mind, turned over to some extent the relations that existed between the latch, the door, and the object she had in view. So if the colt should go to a pump, as a cow is alleged to have done, and take the handle in its mouth without being taught, and pump water to drink, it would show that the animal had used its powers of thought. Now, what position does the elephant take in the scale of intelligence?
The Hindoos of the present day do not consider the elephant a remarkably intelligent animal. Yet at one time its sagacity was certainly appreciated, as the Hindoo god of wisdom is figured with the body of a man and the head of an elephant; and A. W. Schlegel states that in very early times they marvelled at every thing about the animal, especially its sagacity, which made it seem to them the embodiment of the god Ganessa.
Probably Dr. Dalton expresses the latest knowledge touching this subject. He says,—
“If we examine the comparative development of the hemispheres of the brain in different species of animals, and in different races of men, we shall find that the size of these ganglia corresponds very closely with the degree of intelligence possessed by the individual.... Among quadrupeds, the elephant has much the largest, and most perfectly formed, cerebrum, in proportion to the size of the entire body; and, of all quadrupeds, he is proverbially the most intelligent and the most teachable. It is important to observe, in this connection, that the kind of intelligence which characterizes the elephant and some other of the lower animals, and which most nearly resembles that of man, is a teachable intelligence,—a very different thing from the intelligence which depends upon instinct, such as that of insects, for example, or birds of passage.”