The elephants of India are being rapidly thinned out, as they with the tigers hold forest lands which when developed are very productive.
The elephant herds move slowly on irregular circuit, eating everything about them.
We found no great number together as in a herd of cattle; sometimes only one and never more than five in a group.
It can be no trick for the exultant European sportsmen to shoot them, for they are not wild and will hurt no one, unless it be an old defeated bull, who are said to be ferocious at times.
Ivory now in use is not, as a rule, from the now living elephants. The natives search it out from under the forest debris, where the remains of elephants who lived thousands of years ago are found.
MESOPOTAMIA
After visiting the interior of Japan, China, Anam, Siam, Ceylon, India, Persia, Arabia, I found myself, in the evening of November 2, 1899, at Bagdad, Turkey, in close communion with our American consul, Rudolph Hurner, who had held that position from the United States to Mesopotamia for about thirty years. Bagdad is about 400 miles from the Persian gulf, and is now the largest Mesopotamian city of the old Babylonian empire, whose kings once caused the world to wince.
Mesopotamia, like the valley of the Yangtsekiang, is by nature very productive. Either, if properly cultivated, would supply rice sufficient to sustain the world, but here the outrageous taxes, together with the wild men of the desert scare away all enterprise, while in China the Yaw-men actually absorb the products of the soil through the imposition of exchange.