The use of the elephant’s tusks is less clearly defined. Though they are frequently described as warding off the attacks of the tiger and rhinoceros, often securing the victory by one blow, which transfixes the assailant to the earth, it is perfectly obvious, both from their almost vertical position and the difficulty of raising the head above the level of the shoulder, that they were never designed for weapons of attack. No doubt they may prove of great assistance in digging up roots, but that they are far from indispensable is proved by their being but rarely seen in the females, and by their almost constant absence in the Ceylon elephant, where they are generally found reduced to mere stunted processes.
The elephants live in herds, usually consisting of from ten to twenty individuals, and each herd is a family, not brought together by accident or attachment, but owning a common lineage and relationship. In the forest several herds will browse in close contiguity, and in their expeditions in search of water they may form a body of possibly one or two hundred, but on the slightest disturbance, each distinct herd hastens to re-form within its own particular circle, and to take measures on its own behalf for retreat or defence.
Generally the most vigorous and courageous of the herd assumes the leadership: his orders are observed with the most implicit obedience, and the devotion and loyalty evinced by his followers are very remarkable. In Ceylon this is more readily seen in the case of a tusker than in any other, because in a herd he is generally the object of the keenest pursuit by the hunters. On such occasions the elephants do their utmost to protect him from danger; when driven to extremity, they place the leader in the centre, and crowd so eagerly in front of him that the sportsmen have to shoot a number which they might otherwise have spared.
When individuals have been expelled from a herd, or by some accident have lost their former associates, they are not permitted to attach themselves to any other family, and ever after wander about the woods as outcasts from their kind. Rendered morose and savage from rage and solitude, they not only commit great injuries in the plantations, trampling down the rice-grounds, and tearing up the trees, but even travellers are exposed to the utmost risk from their unprovoked assaults.
As the elephant surpasses all other land animals in strength and weight, his mental faculties also assign to him one of the first places in the animal creation. His docility, his attachment to his master, his ready obedience, are qualities in which he is scarcely inferior to the dog, and it is astonishing how easily he suffers himself to be led by his puny guide.
The dog has been the companion of man through an endless series of generations, a servitude of many centuries has modified his physical and moral type; but the elephant, whom, in spite of his prodigious powers, we train to an equal obedience, is always originally the free-born son of the forest (for he never propagates in a state of captivity), and is often advanced in years before being obliged to change the independence of the woods for the yoke of thraldom. What services might not be expected from so gifted an animal were we able to educate the species as we do the individual?
The elephant inhabits both Asia and Africa, but each of these two parts of the world has its peculiar species. The African elephant is distinguished by the lozenge-shaped prominences of ivory and enamel on the surface of his grinders, which in the Indian elephant are narrow transverse parts of uniform breadth; his skull has a more rounded form, and is deficient in the double lateral bump conspicuous in the former; and he has only fifty-four vertebræ, while the Indian has sixty-one. On the other hand, he possesses twenty-one ribs, while the latter has only nineteen. His tusks are also much larger, and his body is of much greater bulk, as the female attains the stature of the full-grown Indian male. The ear is at least three times the size, being not seldom above four feet long and broad, so that Dr. Livingstone mentions having seen a negro who under cover of one of these prodigious flaps effectually screened himself from the rain.
The African elephant has a very wide range, from Caffraria to Nubia, and from the Zambesi to Cape Verde, and the impenetrable deserts of the Sahara alone prevent him from wandering to the shores of the Mediterranean. Although in South Africa the persecutions of the natives, and of his still more formidable enemies—the colonists and English huntsmen, have considerably thinned his numbers, and driven him farther and farther to the north, yet in the interior of the country he is still met with in prodigious numbers. Dr. Barth frequently saw large herds winding through the open plains, and swimming in majestic lines through the rivers with elevated trunks, or bathing in the shallow lakes for coolness or protection against insects.
Dr. Livingstone gives us many interesting accounts of South African elephant-hunting. The Banijai on the south bank of the Zambesi erect stages on high trees overhanging the paths by which the elephants come, and then use a heavy spear four or five feet long. When the unfortunate animal comes beneath, they throw this formidable weapon, and if it enters between the ribs above, as the blade is at least twenty inches long by two broad, the motion of the handle, as it is aided by knocking against the trees, makes frightful gashes within, and soon causes death. They kill them also by means of a spear inserted in a beam of wood, which being suspended on the branch of a tree by a cord attached to a latch, fastened in the path and intended to be struck by the animal’s foot, leads to the fall of the beam, and the spear being poisoned, causes death in a few hours.
On the sloping banks of the Zouga the Bayeiye dig deep pitfalls to entrap the animals as they come to drink, but though these traps are constructed with the greatest ingenuity, old elephants have been known to precede the herd and whisk off their coverings all the way down to the water, or, giving proof of a still more astonishing sagacity, to have actually lifted the young out of the pits into which they had stumbled.