[35] Ibid. l. ii. c. 38.
[36] Armandi, Hist. Milit. des Eléphants, lib. ii. c. x. p. 380. Horace mentions a white elephant as having been exhibited at Rome: “Sive elephas albus vulgi converteret ora.” (Hor. Ep. ii. 196.)
[37] After writing the above, I was permitted by the late Dr. Harrison, of Dublin, to see some accurate drawings of the brain of an elephant, which he had the opportunity of dissecting in 1847; and on looking to that of the base, I have found a remarkable verification of the information which I had previously collected in Ceylon.
The small figure A is the ganglion of the fifth nerve, showing the small motor and large sensitive portion.
The olfactory lobes, from which the olfactory nerves proceed, are large, whilst the optic and muscular nerves of the orbit are singularly small for so vast an animal; and one is immediately struck by the prodigious size of the fifth nerve, which supplies the proboscis with its exquisite sensibility, as well as by the great size of the motor portion of the seventh, which supplies the same organ with its power of movement and action.
[38] Menageries, etc. “The Elephant,” p. 27.
[39] Major Rogers. An account of this singular adventure will be found in the Ceylon Miscellany for 1842, vol. i. p. 221.
[40] Menageries, etc. “The Elephant,” ch. iii. p. 68.
[41] Aristotle, De Anim. lib. iv. c. 9, ὁμοῖον σάλπιγγι. See also Pliny, lib. x. ch. cxiii. A manuscript of the 15th century in the British Museum, containing the romance of “Alexander,” which is probably of the fifteenth century, is interspersed with drawings illustrative of the strange animals of the East. Amongst them are two elephants, whose trunks are literally in the form of trumpets with expanded mouths. See Wright’s Archæological Album, p. 176, and M.S. Reg. 15, e. vi. Brit. Mus.