In drinking, the elephant, like the camel, although preferring water pure, shows no decided aversion to it when discoloured with mud;[77] and the eagerness with which he precipitates himself into the tanks and streams attests his exquisite enjoyment of the fresh coolness, which to him is the chief attraction. In crossing deep rivers, although his rotundity and buoyancy enable him to swim with a less immersion than other quadrupeds, he generally prefers to sink till no part of his huge body is visible except the tip of his trunk, through which he breathes, moving beneath the surface, and only now and then raising his head to look that he is keeping the proper direction.[78] In the dry season the scanty streams which, during the rains, are sufficient to convert the rivers of the low country into torrents, often entirely disappear, leaving only broad expanses of dry sand, which they have swept down with them from the hills. In this the elephants contrive to sink wells for their own use by scooping out the sand to the depth of four or five feet, and leaving a hollow for the percolation of the spring. But as the weight of the elephant would force in the side if left perpendicular, one approach is always formed with such a gradient that he can reach the water with his trunk without disturbing the surrounding sand.
I have reason to believe, although the fact has not been authoritatively stated by naturalists, that the stomach of the elephant will be found to include a chamber analogous to that possessed by some of the ruminants, calculated to contain a supply of water as a provision against emergencies. The fact of his being enabled to retain a quantity of water and discharge it at pleasure has been long known to every observer of the habits of the animal; but the proboscis has always been supposed to be “his water-reservoir,”[79] and the theory of an internal receptacle has not been discussed. The truth is that the anatomy of the elephant is even yet but imperfectly understood,[80] and, although some peculiarities of his stomach were observed at an early period by Aristotle and others;[81] and even their configuration described, the function of the abnormal portion remained undetermined, and has been only recently conjectured. An elephant which belonged to Louis XIV. died at Versailles in 1681 at the age of seventeen, and an account of its dissection was published in the Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire Naturelle, under the authority of the Academy of Sciences, in which the unusual appendages of the stomach are pointed out with sufficient particularity, but no suggestion is made as to their probable uses.”[82]
A writer in the Quarterly Review for December 1850, says that “Camper and other comparative anatomists have shown that the left, or cardiac end of the stomach in the elephant is adapted, by several wide folds of lining membrane, to serve as a receiver for water;” but this is scarcely correct, for although Camper has accurately figured the external form of the stomach, he disposes of the question of the interior functions with the simple remark that its folds “semblent en faire une espèce de division particulière.”[83] In like manner Sir Everard Home, in his Lectures on Comparative Anatomy, has not only carefully described the form of the elephant’s stomach, and furnished a drawing of it even more accurate than Camper; but he has equally failed to assign any purpose for so strange a formation; contenting himself with observing that the structure is a peculiarity, and that one of the remarkable folds nearest the orifice of the diaphragm appears to act as a valve, so that the portion beyond may be considered as an appendage similar to that of the hog and the peccary.[84]
ELEPHANT’S STOMACH.
The appendage thus alluded to by Sir Everard Home is the “grand cul-de-sac,” noticed by the Académie des Sciences, and the “division particulière,” figured by Camper. It is of sufficient dimensions to contain ten gallons of water, and by means of the valve above alluded to, it can be shut off from the chamber devoted to the process of digestion. Professor Owen is probably the first who, not from an autopsy, but from the mere inspection of the drawings of Camper and Home, ventured to assert (in lectures hitherto unpublished), that the uses of this section of the elephant’s stomach may be analogous to those ascertained to belong to a somewhat similar arrangement in the stomach of the camel, one cavity of which is exclusively employed as a reservoir for water, and performs no function in the preparation of food.[85]
