The writer says, “an elephant descending a bank of too acute an angle to admit of his walking down it direct, (which, were he to attempt, his huge body, soon disarranging the centre of gravity, would certainly topple over,) proceeds thus. His first manœuvre is to kneel down close to the edge of the declivity, placing his chest to the ground: one fore leg is then cautiously passed a short way down the slope; and if there is no natural protection to afford a firm footing, he speedily forms one by stamping into the soil if moist, or kicking out a footing if dry. This point gained, the other fore leg is brought down in the same way; and performs the same work, a little in advance of the first; which is thus at liberty to move lower still. Then, first one and then the second of the hind legs is carefully drawn over the side, and the hind feet in turn occupy the resting-places previously used and left by the fore ones. The course, however, in such precipitous ground is not straight from top to bottom, but slopes along the face of the bank, descending till the animal gains the level below. This an elephant has done, at an angle of 45 degrees, carrying a howdah, its occupant, his attendant, and sporting apparatus; and in a much less time than it takes to describe the operation.” I have observed that an elephant in descending a declivity uses his knees, on the side next the bank; and his feet on the lower side only.
[72] A correspondent of Buffon, M. Marcellus Bles, Seigneur de Moergestal, who resided eleven years in Ceylon in the time of the Dutch, says in one of his communications, that in herds of forty or fifty, enclosed in a single corral, there were frequently very young calves; and that “on ne pouvoit pas reconnoître quelles étoient les mères de chacun de ces petits éléphans, car tous ces jeunes animaux paroissent faire manse commune; ils têtent indistinctement celles des femelles de toute la troupe qui ont du lait, soit qu’elles aient elles-mêmes un petit en propre, soit qu’elles n’en aient point.” (Buffon, Suppl. à l’Hist. des Anim. vol. vi. p. 25.)
[73] White, in his Natural History of Selbourne, philosophising on the fact which had fallen under his own notice of this indiscriminate suckling of the young of one animal by the parent of another, is disposed to ascribe it to a selfish feeling; the pleasure and relief of having its distended teats drawn by this intervention. He notices the circumstance of a leveret having been thus nursed by a cat, whose kittens had been recently drowned; and observes that “this strange affection was probably occasioned by that desiderium, those tender maternal feelings, which the loss of her kittens had awakened in her breast; and by the complacency and ease she derived to herself from procuring her teats to be drawn, which were too much distended with milk; till from habit she became as much delighted with this foundling as if it had been her real offspring. This incident is no bad solution of that strange circumstance which grave historians, as well as the poets, assert of exposed children being sometimes nurtured by female wild beasts that probably had lost their young. For it is not one whit more marvellous that Romulus and Remus in their infant state should be nursed by a she wolf than that a poor little suckling leveret should be fostered and cherished by a bloody Grimalkin.” (White’s Selborne, lett. xx.) General Sleaman in his narrative of a journey through Oude gives some remarkable narratives of children suckled by wolves and found associating with their cubs.
[74] The term “rogue” is scarcely sufficiently accounted for by supposing it to be the English equivalent for the Singhalese word Hora. In that very curious book, the Life and Adventures of John Christopher Wolf, late principal Secretary at Jaffnapatam in Ceylon, see ante, note, p. 31, the author says, when a male elephant in a quarrel about the females “is beat out of the field and obliged to go without a consort, he becomes furious and mad, killing every living creature, be it man or beast; and in this state is called ronkedor, an object of greater terror to a traveller than a hundred wild ones.” (P. 142.) In another passage, p. 164, he is called runkedor, and I have seen it spelt elsewhere ronquedue. Wolf does not give “ronkedor” as a term peculiar to that section of the island; but both there and elsewhere, it is obsolete at the present day, unless it be open to conjecture that the modern term “rogue” is a modification of ronquedue.
[75] Buchanan, in his Survey of Bhagulpore, p. 503, says that solitary males of the wild buffalo, “when driven from the herd by stronger competitors for female society, are reckoned very dangerous to meet with; for they are apt to wreak their vengeance on whatever they meet, and are said to kill annually three or four people.” Livingstone relates the same of the solitary hippopotamus, which becomes soured in temper, and wantonly attacks the passing canoes. (Travels in South Africa, p. 231.)
[76] Letter from Major Skinner.
[77] This peculiarity was known in the middle ages, and Phile, writing in the fourteenth century, says, that such is his preference for muddy water that the elephant stirs it before he drinks.
Ὕδωρ δὲ πίνει συγχυθὲν πρὶν ἂν πίνοι,
Τὸ γὰρ διειδὲς ἀκριβῶς διαπτύει.