The African Elephant, E. africanus, has been sometimes referred to a distinct genus or sub-genus, Loxodon, by reason of the lozenge-shaped areas on the worn grinding-teeth. It lives, as its name denotes, in Africa. This species has a number of external features which enable it to be distinguished from the Oriental Elephant. The head slopes back more, and has not the two rounded bosses which give so wise a countenance to the Indian species. The ears are very much larger. The tip of the trunk has a slight triangular projection on both the lower and the upper part of the circumference of the aperture. There are four nails on the fore-feet and three on the hind. As in the Indian form, the toes are all bound together, and do not appear for any part as free digits. A thick pad of fat, etc., makes the animal when alive look as if plantigrade, whereas it is, as a matter of fact, digitigrade. In internal features the most prominent difference from E. indicus is in the molar teeth, which are ridged by much fewer ridges. The outside number for a single tooth in the present species is 10 or 11. In Elephas indicus on the other hand there are as many as 27.
The African Elephant, thinks Sir Samuel Baker, reaches a height of about 12 feet, and it will be remembered that the notorious "Jumbo" was found to be 11 feet high at the shoulder. The tusks are found in both sexes, as in the Indian beast, but are relatively larger in the female in the species now under consideration. It is also a rather more active creature, and is more savage;[[133]] however it can be tamed, as is shown by several
specimens which have been and are in the possession of the Zoological Society, and other proprietors. It was apparently used in the past. Certain Carthaginian coins are stamped with a figure of the African Elephant; but in Africa no attempts are now made to utilise this creature except for food and ivory.
Fig. 117.—African Elephant. Elephas africanus. × 1⁄56. (After Sir Samuel Baker.)
The meaning of an Elephant as an emblem. upon a coin appears to be eternity, and there is no question but that the
Elephant is a long-lived animal. It is said that it hardly reaches proper maturity before forty, and that 150 years is not beyond probability in the way of longevity. Even longer periods have been assigned to it.
The tusks of the Elephant are by no means necessarily sexual adornments, used for fighting purposes only. The African Elephant is a most "industrious digger," and grubs up innumerable roots as food. It appears to be a fact that during these operations the right tusk is mainly used, and in consequence that tusk is shorter as well as thinner than the other. Two average tusks would weigh respectively 75 and 65 lbs., the latter of course being the weight of the more worn right tusk. These weights, it should be observed, by no means indicate the limits to which finely-developed tusks can attain. The very heaviest tusk known to Sir Samuel Baker[[134]] weighed 188 lbs. This was sold at an ivory sale in London in the year 1874. The pace of the African Elephant, says the same authority, is at most at the rate of fifteen miles an hour at first, and of course in a furious rush. This pace cannot be kept up for more than two or three hundred yards, after which ten miles an hour is a better approximation to the rate which can be kept up for long distances.
The Indian Elephant, Elephas indicus (or Euelephas indicus, if the genus Loxodon is to be accepted), is better known and has been longer known than the African. It occurs in India and Ceylon, and in some of the Malayan islands, the Elephants of which latter parts of the world have been regarded as a distinct form, an apparently unnecessary procedure.
