[25] The Hastisilpe, a Singhalese work which treats of the “Science of Elephants,” enumerates amongst those which it is not desirable to possess, “the elephant which will fight with a stone or a stick in his trunk.”
[26] Among other eccentric forms, an elephant was seen in 1844, in the district of Bintenne, near Friar’s-Hood Mountain, one of whose tusks was so bent that it took what sailors term a “round turn,” and then resumed its curved direction as before. In the Museum of the College of Surgeons, London, there is a specimen, No 2757, of a spiral tusk.
[27] Since the foregoing remarks were written relative to the undefined use of tusks to the elephant, I have seen a speculation on the same subject in Dr. Holland’s “Constitution of the Animal Creation, as expressed in structural appendages;” but the conjecture of the author leaves the problem scarcely less obscure than before. Struck with the mere supplemental presence of the tusks, the absence of all apparent use serving to distinguish them from the essential organs of the creature, Dr. Holland concludes that their production is a process incident, but not ancillary, to other important ends, especially connected with the vital functions of the trunk and the marvellous motive powers inherent to it; his conjecture is, that they are “a species of safety valve of the animal œconomy,”—and that “they owe their development to the predominance of the senses of touch and smell, conjointly with the muscular motions of which the exercise of these is accompanied.” “Had there been no proboscis,” he thinks, “there would have been no supplementary appendages,—the former creates the latter.” (Pp. 246, 271.)
[28] See Notes on the Natural History of Ceylon by Sir J. Emerson Tennent, p. 60. Sir S. Baker adds as a distinctive feature of the African elephant that its “back is concave while that of the Indian variety is convex.” (The Albert Nyanza, vol. 1. p. 274.)
[29] A native of rank informed me, that “the tail of a high-caste elephant will sometimes touch the ground, but such are very rare.”
[30] This is confirmed by the fact that the scar of the ancle wound, occasioned by the rope on the legs of those which have been captured by noosing, presents precisely the same tint when thoroughly healed.
[31] Mahawanso, ch. xxxviii. p. 254, A.D. 433.
[32] Pallegoix, Siam, etc. vol. i. p. 152.
[33] Mahawanso, ch. xviii. p. 111. The Hindu sovereigns of Orissa, in the middle ages, bore the style of Gajapati, “powerful in elephants.” (Asiat. Res. xv. 253.)
[34] Herod. l. i. c. 189.