Fig. 7.—Elephant Trunk (Uxmal).
Far more striking among the so-called traces of the elephant in North America are the priests' head-dresses from Mexico and Yucatan.
Figure 8, a reduction from plate xiii. in Waldeck's "Recherches sur les Ruines de Palenque," is taken from a stucco bas-relief in the palace of Palenque. Waldeck considers it "evidently a representation of the head of a proboscidean."
Fig. 8.—Elephant Head-dress (Palenque).
Fig. 9.—Elephant Head-dress (Mexico).
Figure 9, the no less fantastic Mexican head-dress, is from the Vues des Cordilleras, plate xv. As to it, Humboldt says: "I would not have had this hideous scene engraved, were it not for the remarkable and apparently not accidental resemblance of the priest's head-dress to the Hindoo Ganesa, or elephant-headed god of wisdom. It seems hardly possible to suppose that a tapir's snout could have suggested the trunk in the head-dress, and we are almost left to infer either that the people of Atzlan had received some notice of the elephant from Asia, or that their traditions reached back to the time of the American elephant."
Fig. 10.—Prehistoric carving of the Mammoth from the cave of La Madeleine.