Should the attention of an individual in the herd be attracted by any unusual appearance in the forest, the intelligence is rapidly communicated by a low suppressed sound made by the lips, somewhat resembling the twittering of a bird, and described by the hunters by the word “prut.”
A very remarkable noise has been described to me by more than one individual, who had come unexpectedly upon a herd during the night, when the alarm of the elephants was apparently too great to be satisfied with the stealthy note of warning just described. On these occasions the sound produced resembled the hollow booming of an empty tun when struck with a wooden mallet or a muffled sledge. Major Macready, Military Secretary in Ceylon in 1836, who heard it by night amongst the wild elephants in the great forest of Bintenne, describes it as “a sort of banging noise like that of a cooper hammering a cask;” and Major Skinner is of opinion that it must be produced by the elephant striking his ribs rapidly and forcibly with his trunk. Mr. Cripps informs me that he has more than once seen an elephant, when surprised or alarmed, produce this sound by beating the ground forcibly with the flat side of the trunk; and this movement was instantly succeeded by raising it again, and pointing it in the direction whence the alarm proceeded, as if to ascertain by the sense of smell the nature of the threatened danger. As this strange sound is generally mingled with the bellowing and ordinary trumpeting of the herd, it is in all probability a device resorted to, not alone for warning their companions of some approaching peril, but also for the additional purpose of terrifying unseen intruders.[42]
Elephants are subject to deafness; and the Singhalese regard as the most formidable of all wild animals, a “rogue”[43] afflicted with this infirmity.
Extravagant estimates are recorded of the height of the elephant. In an age when popular fallacies in relation to him were as yet uncorrected in Europe by the actual inspection of the living animal, he was supposed to grow to the height of twelve or fifteen feet. Even within the last century, in popular works on natural history, the elephant, when full grown, was said to measure from seventeen to twenty feet from the ground to the shoulder.[44] At a still later period, so imperfectly had the truth been ascertained, that the elephant of Ceylon was believed “to excel that of Africa in size and strength.”[45] But so far from equalling the size of the African species, that of Ceylon seldom exceeds the height of nine feet; even in the Hambangtotte country, where the hunters agree that the largest specimens are to be found, the tallest in ordinary herds do not average more than eight feet. Wolf, in his account of the Ceylon elephant,[46] says he saw one taken near Jaffna, which measured twelve feet and one inch high. But the truth is, that the general bulk of the elephant so far exceeds that of the animals we are accustomed to see daily, that the imagination magnifies its unusual dimensions; and I have seldom or ever met with an inexperienced spectator who did not unconsciously overestimate the size of an elephant shown to him, whether in captivity or in a state of nature. Major Denham would have guessed some which he saw in Africa to be sixteen feet in height, but the largest when killed was found to measure nine feet six, from the foot to the hipbone.[47]
For a creature of such extraordinary weight it is astonishing how noiselessly and stealthily the elephant can escape from a pursuer. When suddenly disturbed in the jungle, it will burst away with a rush that seems to bear down all before it; but the noise sinks into absolute stillness so suddenly, that a novice might well be led to suppose that the fugitive had only halted within a few yards of him, when further search will disclose that it has stolen silently away, making scarcely a sound in its escape; and, stranger still, leaving the foliage almost undisturbed by its passage.
The most venerable delusion respecting the elephant, and that which held its ground with unequalled tenacity, is the ancient fallacy thus set out by Sir Thomas Browne in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica. “The elephant, it is said, hath no joynts; and this absurdity is seconded by another, that being unable to lye downe it sleepeth against a tree, which the hunters observing doe saw almost asunder, whereon the beast relying, by the fall of the tree falls also downe it-selfe and is able to rise no more.”[48] Sir Thomas is disposed to think that “the hint and ground of this opinion might be the grosse and somewhat cylindricall composure of the legs of the elephant, and the equality and lesse perceptible disposure of the joynts, especially in the forelegs of this animal, they appearing, when he standeth, like pillars of flesh;” but he overlooks the fact that Pliny has ascribed the same peculiarity to the Scandinavian beast somewhat resembling a horse, which he calls a “machlis,”[49] and that Cæsar in describing the wild animals in the Hercynian forests, enumerates the alce (elk?), “in colour and configuration approaching the goat, but surpassing it in size, its head destitute of horns and its limbs of joints, whence it can neither lie down to rest, nor rise if by any accident it should fall, but using the trees for a resting-place, the hunters by loosening their roots bring the alce to the ground, so soon as it is tempted to lean on them.”[50] This fallacy, as Sir Thomas Browne[51] says, is “not the daughter of latter times, but an old and grey-headed errour, even in the days of Aristotle,” who deals with the story as he received it from Ctesias, by whom it appears to have been embodied in his lost work on India. But although Aristotle generally receives the credit of having exposed and demolished the fallacy of Ctesias,[52] it will be seen by a reference to his treatise On the Progressive Motions of Animals, that in reality he approached the question with some hesitation, and has not only left it doubtful in one passage whether the elephant has joints in his knee, although he demonstrates that it has joints in the shoulders;[53] but in another he distinctly affirms that on account of his weight the elephant cannot bend his forelegs together, but only one at a time, and reclines to sleep on that particular side.[54]
So great was the authority of Aristotle, that Ælian, who wrote two centuries later and borrowed many of his statements from the works of his predecessor, perpetuates this error; and, after describing the exploits of the trained elephants exhibited at Rome, adds the expression of his surprise, that an animal without joints (ἄναρθρον) should yet be able to dance.[55] The fiction was too agreeable to be readily abandoned by the poets of the Lower Empire and the Romancers of the middle ages; and Phile, a contemporary of Petrarch and Dante, who in the early part of the fourteenth century addressed his didactic poem on the elephant to the emperor Andronicus II., untaught by the exposition of Aristotle, still clung to the old delusion,
Πόδες δὲ τούτῳ θαῦμα καὶ σαφὲς τέρας,
Οὓς, οὐ καθάπερ τἆλλα τῶν ζώων γένη,