More Science from an Easy Chair

by Sir E. Ray Lankester

At no great distance of time before the historic period, earlier, indeed, than the times of the herdsmen who used polished stone implements and raised great stone circles, namely, in the late Pleistocene period, we find that there existed all over Europe and North Asia and the northern part of America another elephant very closely allied to the Indian elephant, but having a bow-like outward curvature of the tusks, their points finally directed towards one another, and a thick growth of coarse hair all over the body. This is "the mammoth," the remains of which are found in every river valley in England, France and Germany, and of which whole carcases are frequently discovered in Northern Siberia, preserved from decay in the frozen river gravels and "silt." The ancient cave-men of France used the fresh tusks of the mammoth killed on the spot for their carvings and engravings, and from their time to this the ivory of the mammoth has been, and remains, in constant use. It is estimated that during the last two centuries at least 100 pairs of mammoths' tusks have been each year exported from the frozen lands of Siberia. In early mediæval times the trade existed, and some ivory carvings and drinking horns of that age appear to be fashioned from this more ancient ivory.

Already, then, within the human period we find elephants closely similar to those of our own time, far more numerous and more widely distributed than in our own day, and happily established all over the temperate regions of the earth—even in our Thames Valley and in the forests where London now spreads its smoky brickwork. When we go further back in time—as the diggings and surveying of modern man enable us to do—we find other elephants of many different species, some differing greatly from the three species I have mentioned, and leading us back by gradual steps to a comparatively small animal, about the size of a donkey, without the wonderful trunk or the immense tusks of the later elephants. By the discovery and study of these earlier forms we have within the last ten years arrived at a knowledge of the steps by which the elephant acquired in the course of long ages (millions of years) his "proboscis" (as the Greeks first called it), and I will later sketch that history.

But now let us first of all note some of the peculiarities of living elephants and the points by which the two kinds differ from one another. The most striking fact about the elephant is its enormous size. It is only exceeded among living animals by whales; it is far larger than the biggest bull, or rhinoceros, or hippopotamus. A fair-sized Indian elephant weighs two to three tons (Jumbo, one of the African species, weighed five), and requires as food 60 lb. of oats, 1-1/2 truss of hay, 1-1/2 truss of corn a day, costing together in this country about 5s.; whereas a large cart-horse weighs 15 cwt., and requires weekly three trusses of hay and 80 lb. of oats, costing together 12s. or about 1s. 8-1/2d. a day. It is this which has proved fatal to the elephant since man took charge of the world. The elephant requires so much food and takes so many years in growing up (twenty or more before he is old enough to be put to work), that it is only in countries where there is a super-abundance of forest in which he can be allowed to grow to maturity at his own "charges" (so to speak) that it is worth while to attempt to domesticate and make use of him. For most purposes three horses are more "handy" than one elephant. The elephant is caught when he is already grown up, and then trained. It is as a matter of economy that he is not bred in confinement, and not because there is any insuperable difficulty in the matter. Occasionally elephants have bred in menageries.

There is no doubt that the African elephant at the present day grows to a larger size than the Indian, though it was the opinion of the Romans of the Empire that the Indian elephant was the more powerful, courageous, and intelligent of the two. It seems next to impossible to acquire at the present day either specimens or trustworthy records of the largest Indian elephants. About 10 ft. 6 ins. at the shoulder seems to be the maximum, though they are dressed up by their native owners with platforms and coverings to make them look bigger. In India the skin of domesticated individuals is polished and carefully stained, like an old boot, by the assiduity of their guardians, so that a museum specimen of exceptional size, fit for exhibition and study, cannot be obtained. On the other hand, the African elephant not unfrequently exceeds a height of 11 ft. at the shoulder. With some trouble I obtained one exceeding this measurement direct from East Africa for the Natural History Museum, where it now stands. It seems highly probable that this species occasionally exceeds 12 ft. in height. On the ground, between the great African elephant's fore and hind legs, in the museum, I placed a stuffed specimen of the smallest terrestrial mammal—the pigmy shrew-mouse. It is worth while thus calling to mind that the little animal has practically every separate bone, muscle, blood-vessel, nerve, and other structure present in the huge monster compared with it—is, in fact, built closely upon the same plan, and yet is so much smaller that it is impossible to measure one by the other. The mouse is only about one fifth the length of the elephant's eye. According to ancient Oriental fable, the mouse and the dragon were the only two animals of which the elephant was afraid.

The African elephant has much larger tusks relatively to his size than the Indian, and both males and females have them, whereas the Indian female has none. A very fine Indian elephant's tusk weighs from 75 lb. to 80 lb. The record for an African elephant's tusk was (according to standard books) 180 lb. But I obtained ten years ago for the museum, where it now may be seen, an African elephant's tusk weighing 228-1/2 lb. Its fellow weighed a couple of pounds less. It measures 10 ft. 2 in. in length along the curvature. This tusk was recognised by Sir Henry Stanley's companion, Mr. Jephson, when he was with me in the museum, as actually one which he had last seen in the centre of Africa. He told me that he had, in fact, weighed and measured this tusk in the treasury of Emin Pasha, in Central Africa, when he went with Stanley to bring Emin down to the coast. As will be remembered, Emin had no wish to go to the coast, but returned to his province. He was subsequently attacked and murdered by an Arab chief, who appropriated his store of ivory, and in the course of time had it conveyed to the ivory market at Zanzibar. The date of the purchase there of the museum specimen corresponds with the history given by Mr. Jephson.

Fig. 8.—The crowns of three "grinders" or molars of elephants compared. a is that of an extinct mastodon with four transverse ridges; b is that of the African elephant with nine ridges in use and ground flat; c is that of the mammoth with sixteen narrow ridges in use—the rest, some eight in number, are at the left hand of the figure and not yet in use.

The African elephant (as could be seen by comparing the small one living in Regent's Park with its neighbours) has a sloping forehead graduating into the trunk or proboscis, instead of the broad, upright brow of the Indian. He also has very much larger ears, which lie against the shoulders (except when he is greatly excited) like a short cape or cloak (see Fig. 7). These great ears differ somewhat in shape in the elephants of different parts of Africa, and local races can be distinguished by the longer or shorter angle into which the flap is drawn out. The grinding teeth of the two elephants differ very markedly, but one must see these in a museum. The grinders are very large and long (from behind forwards), coming into place one after the other. Each grinder occupies, when fully in position, the greater part of one side of the upper or of the lower jaw. They are crossed from right to left by ridges of enamel, like a series of mountains and valleys, which gradually wear down by rubbing against those of the tooth above or below. The biggest grinder of the Indian elephant has twenty-four of these transverse ridges, whilst that of the African has only eleven, which are therefore wider apart (see Fig. 8). An extinct kind of elephant—the mastodon—had only five such ridges on its biggest grinders, and four or only three on the others. Other ancestral elephants had quite ordinary-looking grinders, with only two or three irregular ridges or broad tubercles. Both the Indian and African elephant have hairless, rough, very hard, wrinkled skins. But the new-born young are covered with hair, and some Indian elephants living in cold, mountainous regions appear to retain a certain amount of hair through life. The mammoth (which agreed with the Indian elephant in the number of ridges on its grinders and in other points) lived in quite cold, sub-Arctic conditions, at a time when glaciers completely covered Scandinavia and the north of our islands as well as most of Germany. It retained a complete coat of coarse hair throughout life. The young of our surviving elephants only exhibit transitorily the family tendency.

The last mammoth probably disappeared from the area which is now Great Britain about 150,000 years ago. It might be supposed that no elephant was seen in England again until the creation of "menageries" and "zoological gardens" within the last two or three hundred years. This, however, is by no means the case. The Italians in the middle ages, and through them the French and the rulers of Central Europe, kept menageries and received as presents, or in connection with their trade with the East and their relations with Eastern rulers, frequent specimens of strange beasts from distant lands. Our King Henry I, had a menagerie at Woodstock, where he kept a porcupine, lions, leopards, and a camel! The Emperor Charlemagne received in 803 a.d. from Haroun al Raschid, the Caliph of Bagdad, an elephant named Abulabaz. It was brought to Aix-la-Chapelle by Isaac the Jew, and died suddenly in 810. Some four and a half centuries later (in 1257), Louis IX, of France, returning from the Holy Land, sent as a special and magnificent present to Henry III, King of England (according to the chronicle of Matthew Paris), an elephant which was exhibited at the Tower of London. It was supposed by the chronicler to be the first ever brought to England, and indeed the first to be taken beyond Italy, for he did not know of Charlemagne's specimen. In 1591 King Henry IV of France, wishing to be very polite to Queen Elizabeth of England, and apparently rather troubled by the expense of keeping the beast himself, sent to her, having heard that she would like to have it, an elephant which had been brought from the "Indies" and landed at Dieppe. He declared it to be the first which had ever come into France, but presented it to Her Majesty "as I would most willingly present anything more excellent did I possess it." Thenceforward elephants were from time to time exhibited at the Tower, together with lions and other strange beasts acquired by the Crown.

None of these elephants were, however, "the first who ever burst" into remote Britain after the mammoths had disappeared, and we were separated from Europe by the geological changes which gave us the English Channel—La Manche. Though Julius Cæsar himself does not mention it, it is definitely stated by a writer on strategy named Polyænus, a friend of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, but not, I am sorry to say, an authority to whose statements historians attach any serious value—that Cæsar made use of an elephant armed with iron plates and carrying on its back a tower full of armed men to terrify the ancient Britons when he crossed the Thames—an operation which he carried out, I believe, somewhere between Molesey and Staines.