More Science from an Easy Chair

by Sir E. Ray Lankester

Elephants are often spoken of as "Ungulates," and classed by naturalists with the hoofed animals (the odd toed tapirs, rhinoceroses, and horses, and the even-toed pigs, camel, cattle, and deer). But there is not much to say in defence of such an association. The elephants have, as a matter of fact, not got hoofs, and they have five toes on each foot. The five toes of the front foot have each a nail, whilst usually only four toes of the hind foot have nails. A speciality of the elephant is the great circular pad of thick skin overlying fat and fibrous tissue, which forms the sole of the foot and bears the animal's enormous weight. This buffer-like development of the foot existed in some great extinct mammals (the Dinoceras family, of North America), but is altogether different from the support given by a horse's hoof or the paired shoe-like hoofs of great cattle or the three rather elegant hoofed toes of the rhinoceros.

The Indian elephant likes good, solid ground to walk on, and when he finds himself in a boggy place will seize any large objects (preferably big branches of trees) and throw them under his feet to prevent himself sinking in. Occasionally he will remove the stranger who is riding on his back and make use of him in this way. The circumference of the African elephant's fore-foot is found by hunters to be half the animal's height at the shoulder, and is regarded as furnishing a trustworthy indication of his stature.

The legs of the elephant differ from those of more familiar large animals in the fact that the ankle and the wrist (the so-called knee of the horse's foreleg) are not far above the sole of the foot (resembling man's joints in this respect), whilst the true knee-joint (called "the stifle" in horses)—instead of being, as in horses, high up, close against the body, strongly flexed even when at rest, and obscured by the skin—is far below the body, free and obvious enough. In fact, the elephant keeps the thigh and the upper arm perpendicular and in line with the lower segment of the limb when he is standing, so that the legs are pillar-like. But he bends the joints amply when in quick movement. The hind legs seen in action resemble, in the proportions of thigh, foreleg, and foot, and the bending at the knee and ankle, very closely those of a man walking on "all fours." The elephant as known in Europe more than 300 years ago was rarely seen in free movement. He was kept chained up in his stall, resting on his straight, pillar-like legs and their pad-like feet. And with that curious avidity for the marvellous which characterized serious writers in those days to the exclusion of any desire or attempt to ascertain the truth, it was coolly asserted, and then commonly believed, that the elephant could not bend his legs. Shakespeare—who, of course, is merely using a common belief of his time as a chance illustration of human character—makes Ulysses say (referring to his own stiffness of carriage) ("Troilus and Cressida," Act II) "The elephant hath joints, but none for courtesy; his legs are legs for necessity, not for flexure." An old writer says: "The elephant hath no joints, and, being unable to lye down, it lieth against a tree, which, the hunters observing, do saw almost asunder; whereon the beast relying—by the fall of the tree falls also down itself, and is able to rise no more." Another old writer (Bartholomew, 1485), says, more correctly: "When the elephant sitteth he bendeth his feet; he bendeth the hinder legs right as a man."

A writer of 120 years later in date (Topsell) says: "In the River Ganges there are blue worms of sixty cubits long having two arms; these when the elephants come to drink in that river take their trunks in their hands and pull them off. At the sight of a beautiful woman elephants leave off all rage and grow meek and gentle. In Africa there are certain springs of water which, if at any time they dry up, they are opened and recovered again by the teeth of elephants." The blue worm of the Ganges referred to is no doubt the crocodile; both in India and Africa animals coming to the rivers to drink are seized by lurking crocodiles, who fix their powerful jaws on to the face (snout or muzzle) of the drinking animal and drag it under the water. Thus the fable has arisen of the origin of the elephant's trunk as recounted by Mr. Rudyard Kipling. A young elephant (before the days of trunks), according to this authority, when drinking at a riverside had his moderate and well-shaped snout seized by a crocodile. The little elephant pulled and the crocodile pulled, and by the help of a friendly python the elephant got the best of it. He extricated himself from the jaws of death. But, oh! what a difference in his appearance! His snout was drawn out so as to form that wonderful elongated thing with two nostrils at the end which we call the elephant's trunk, and was henceforth transmitted (a first-rate example of an "acquired character") to future generations! The real origin of the elephant's trunk is (as I will explain later) a different one from that handed down to us in the delightful jungle-book. I do not believe in the hereditary transmission of acquired modifications!

Topsell may or may not be right as to the result produced on elephants by the sight of a beautiful woman. In Africa the experiment would be a difficult one, and even in India inconclusive. Topsell seems, however, to have come across correct information about the digging for water by an African elephant by the use of his great tusks—those tusks for the gain of which he is now being rapidly exterminated by man. Serious drought is frequent in Africa, and a cause of death to thousands of animals. African elephants, working in company, are known to have excavated holes in dried-up river beds to the depth of 25 feet in a single night in search of water. It is probable that the Indian elephant's tusk would not be of service in such digging, and it is to be noted that he is rather an inhabitant of high ground and table-lands than of tropical plains liable to flood and to drought. The tusk of the Indian elephant has become merely a weapon of attack for the male, and there are even local breeds in which it is absent in the males as well as in the females. The mammoth was a near cousin of the Indian elephant, and inhabited cold uplands and the fringes of sub-Arctic forests, on which he fed. His tusks were very large, and curved first outward and then inward at the tips. They would not have served for heavy digging, and probably were used for forcing a way through the forest and as a protection to the face and trunk.

The trunk of the elephant was called "a hand" by old writers, and it seems to have acted in the development of the elephant's intelligence in the same way as man's hand has in regard to his mental growth, though in a less degree. The Indian elephant has a single tactile and grasping projection (sometimes called "a finger") placed above between the two nostrils at the end of the trunk; the African elephant has one above and one below. I have seen the elephant pick up with this wonderful trunk with equal facility a heavy man and then a threepenny piece.

The intelligence of the elephant is sometimes exaggerated by reports and stories; sometimes it is not sufficiently appreciated. It is not fair to compare the intelligence of the elephant with that of the dog—bred and trained by man for thousands of years. So far as one can judge, there is no wild animal, excepting the higher apes, which exhibits so much and such varied intelligence as the elephant. It appears that from early tertiary times (late Eocene) the ancestors of elephants have had large brains, whilst, when we go back so far as this, the ancestors of nearly all other animals had brains a quarter of the size (and even less in proportion to body-size) which their modern representatives have. Probably the early possession of a large brain at a geological period when brains were as a rule small is what has enabled the elephants not only to survive until to-day, but to spread over the whole world (except Australia), and to develop an immense variety and number of individuals throughout the tertiary series in spite of their ungainly size. It is only the yet bigger brain of man which (would it were not so!) is now at last driving this lovable giant, this vast compound of sagacity and strength, out of existence. The elephant—like man standing on his hind legs—has a wide survey of things around him owing to his height. He can take time to allow of cerebral intervention in his actions since he is so large that he has little cause to be afraid and to hurry. He has a fine and delicate exploring organ in his trunk, with its hand-like termination; with this he can, and does, experiment and builds up his individual knowledge and experience. Elephants act together in the wild state, aiding one another to uproot trees too large for one to deal with alone. They readily understand and accept the guidance of man, and with very small persuasion and teaching execute very dextrous work—such as the piling of timber. If man had selected the more intelligent elephants for breeding over a space of a couple of thousand years a prodigy of animal intelligence would have resulted. But man has never "bred" the elephant at all.

The Greeks and Romans knew ivory first, and then became acquainted with the elephant. The island of Elephantina in the Nile was from the earliest times a seat of trade in the ivory tusks of the African elephant, and so acquired its name. Herodotus is the first to mention the elephant itself; Homer only refers to the ivory by the word "elephas." Aristotle in this, as in other matters, is more correct than later writers. He probably received first-hand information about the elephant from Alexander and some of his men after their Indian expedition. The Romans had an unpleasant first personal experience of elephants when Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, landed a number with his army and put the Roman soldiers to flight. But the Romans then, and continually in after-times, showed their cool heads and sound judgment in a certain contempt for elephants as engines of war. They soon learned to dig pits on the battlefield to entrap the great beasts, and they deliberately made for the elephants' trunks, hewing them through with their swords, so that the agonised and maddened creatures turned round and trampled down the troops of their own side. The Romans only used them subsequently to terrify barbaric people, and as features in military processions. But Eastern nations used them extensively in war. In a.d. 217 Antiochus the Great brought 217 elephants in his army against 73 employed by Ptolemy, at what was called "the Battle of the Elephants." The battle commenced by the charging head to head of the opposing elephants and the discharge of arrows, spears and stones by the men in the towers on their backs.

An interesting question has been raised as to whether the elephants used by the Carthaginians were the African species or the Indian. There is no doubt that the elephants of Pyrrhus and those known to Alexander were the Indian, though they were taken in those days much to the West of India, namely, in Mesopotamia, and it would not have been difficult for the Carthaginians to convey Indian elephants, which had certainly been brought as far as Egypt, along the Mediterranean coast. An unfounded prejudice as to the want of docility of the African elephant has favoured the notion that the Carthaginians used the Indian elephant. As a matter of fact, no one in modern times has tried to train the African elephant, except here and there in a zoological garden. Probably the Indian "mahout," or elephant trainer could, if he were put to it, do as much with an African as he does with an Indian elephant. It would be an interesting experiment. In the next place, there is decisive evidence that it was the African elephant which the Carthaginians used, since we have a Carthaginian coin (Fig. 7) on which is beautifully represented—in unmistakable modelling—the African elephant, with his large triangular cape-like ears and his sloping forehead. In the time of Hannibal there were stables for over 300 of these elephants at Carthage, and he took fifty with him to the South of France with his army for the Italian invasion. He only got thirty-seven safely over the Rhone, and all but a dozen or so died in the terrible passage of the Alps. After the battle of Trebia he had only eight left, and when he had crossed the Apennines there was only one still alive. On this Hannibal himself rode.

Since the period when the white chalk which now forms our cliffs and hills was deposited at the bottom of a vast and deep ocean—the sea bottom has been raised, the chalk has emerged and risen on the top of hills to 800 feet in height in our own islands, and to ten times that height elsewhere, and during that process sands and clays and shelly gravels have been deposited to the thickness of some 2,800 feet by seas and estuaries and lakes, which have come and gone on the face of Europe and of other parts of the world as it has slowly sunk and slowly risen again. The last 200 feet or so of deposits we call the Pleistocene or Quaternary; the rest are known as the Tertiary strata. They are only a small part of the total thickness of aqueous deposit of stratified rock—which amounts to 60,000 feet more before the earliest remains of life in the Cambrian beds are reached, whilst older than, and therefore below this, we have another 50,000 feet of water-made rock which yields no fossils—no remains of living things, though living things were certainly there! Our little layer of Tertiary strata on the top is, however, very important. It took several million years in forming, although it is only one-fortieth of the whole thickness of aqueous deposit on the crust of the earth. We divide it into Pliocene, Miocene, and Eocene, and each of these into upper, middle, and lower, the Eocene being the oldest. Our London clay and Woolwich sands are lower Eocene; there is a good deal of Miocene in Switzerland and Germany, whilst the Pliocene is represented by whole provinces of Italy, parts of central France, and by the White and Red "crags" of Suffolk.[5]