[166] Ostéographie, “Eléph.” p. 74.
[167] Fleurens, De la Longévité Humaine, pp. 82, 89.
[168] This remark regarding the elephant of Ceylon does not appear to extend to that of Africa, as I observe that Beaver, in his African Memoranda, says that “the skeletons of old ones that have died in the woods are frequently found.” (African Memoranda relative to an attempt to establish British Settlements at the Island of Bulama. Lond. 1815, p. 353.)
[169] A corral was organised near Putlam in 1846, by Mr. Morris, the chief officer of the district. It was constructed across one of the paths to which the elephants resort in their frequent marches, and during the course of the proceedings two of the captured elephants died. Their carcases were left of course within the enclosure, which was abandoned as soon as the capture was complete. The wild elephants resumed their path through it, and a few days afterwards the headman reported to Mr. Morris that the bodies had been removed and carried outside the corral to a spot to which nothing but the elephants could have borne them.
[170] Expositio de Eleph. l. 243.
[171] The selection by animals of a place to die, is not confined to the elephant. Darwin says, that in South America “the guanacos (llamas) appear to have favourite spots for lying down to die; on the banks of the Santa Cruz river, in certain circumscribed spaces which were generally bushy and all near the water, the ground was actually white with their bones: on one such spot I counted between ten and twenty heads.”—Nat. Voy. ch. viii. The same has been remarked in the Rio Gallegos; and at St. Jago in the Cape de Verde Islands, Darwin saw a retired corner similarly covered with the bones of the goat, as if it were “the burial-ground of all the goats in the island.”
[172] Arabian Nights’ Entertainment, Lane’s edition, vol. iii. p. 77.
[173] See a disquisition on the origin of the story of Sinbad, by M. Reinaud, in the introduction prefixed to his translation of the Arabian Geography of Aboulfeda, vol. i. p. lxxvi.