MOUNTED SKELETON OF HALITHERIUM, IN THE HEIDELBERG UNIVERSITY MUSEUM.
SKELETON OF INDIAN ELEPHANT.
ORDER PROBOSCIDEA (ELEPHANTS).
Order Proboscidea—Antiquity of the Elephant—Referred to in the Bible—Mentioned in the Apocrypha—War Elephants—Their Accoutrements—Hannibal’s Elephants—Elephants amongst the Romans—Skull—Dentition—Vertebræ—Odd Delusion about its Legs—Proboscis—Species—[THE INDIAN ELEPHANT]—Size—Range—Habits—Various Modes of Capture—Keddah—Used as a Labourer or Nurse—Sagacity—White Elephants—[THE AFRICAN ELEPHANT]—Characteristics—Range—Habits and Haunts—Hunting—Pitfalls—Aggageers Chasing—Elephant-Shooting—How the Natives Cut it up—[FOSSIL ELEPHANTS AND THEIR ALLIES]—Absurd Stories—[MAMMOTH]—How it was first Found—Story of the Fourth or Benkendorf’s Discovery—Range—[MASTODON]—[DINOTHERIUM].
THE Elephants, Horses, Rhinoceroses, Tapirs, Coneys, Pigs, and Hippopotami, were all grouped together by the older naturalists under the order of Pachyderms,[256] or thick-skinned animals provided with hoofs, but not furnished with a complex stomach for rumination, or chewing of the cud. They are now divided into three different orders—the Proboscidea, Hyracoidea, and Ungulata—which we shall define and describe each in its proper place.
The order Proboscidea, or animals possessed of a proboscis, or trunk, consists of two living species, the Indian and African Elephant, and two extinct genera known as Dinotherium and Mastodon. The Elephant, from its large size and its singular sagacity, attracted the attention of man in the earliest times, and was always looked upon with feelings of awe and reverence. At the present time the African savage, in the region of the Congo, compasses its death with the mysterious aid of the medicine-man, according to Mr. Winwood Reade, as well as by the ordinary means of hunting. The animal, in early times, was used both for purposes of war and peace, and figures, at the present time, alike in the gorgeous retinues of Indian princes, and ministers to the more humble and more useful services of the husbandman. The ivory furnished by its tusks was known in the remotest antiquity. The first undoubted mention of the Elephant in the Bible relates to the use of ivory, which certainly was employed by the ancient Greeks, Assyrians, and Egyptians early in their history.
King Solomon had a throne of ivory, which was obtained through the Phœnician traders probably from Africa. “For the king had at sea a navy of Tharshish (Cilicia) with the navy of Hiram; once in three years came the navy of Tharshish, bringing gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks” (1 Kings x. 22). Elephants are also mentioned in 2 Chron. ix. 21; and at considerable length in the first and second books of Maccabees, where their use in war is described (1 Macc. vi. 28–30; 43–46).