Gordon Cumming gives us the following information as to how the natives cut up an Elephant for food and other purposes. “The rough outer skin is first removed, in large sheets, from the side which lies uppermost. Several coats of an under skin are then met with. This skin is of a tough and pliant nature, and is used by the natives for making water-bags, in which they convey supplies of water from the nearest ‘vley,’ or fountain (which is often ten miles distant), to the Elephants. They remove this inner skin with caution, taking care not to cut it with the assegai; and it is formed into water-bags by gathering the corners and edges, and transfixing the whole on a pointed wand. The flesh is then removed in enormous sheets from the ribs, when the hatchets come into play, with which they chop through, and remove individually, each colossal rib. The bowels are thus laid bare; and in the removal of these the leading men take a lively interest and active part, for it is throughout and around the intestines that the fat of the Elephant is mainly found.
“There are few things which a Bechuana prizes so highly as fat of any description. They will go an amazing distance for a small portion of it. They use it principally in cooking their sun-dried biltong, and they also eat it with their corn. The fat of the Elephant lies in extensive layers and sheets in his inside, and the quantity which is obtained from a full-grown bull, in high condition, is very great. Before it can be obtained, the greater part of the intestines must be removed. To accomplish this, several men eventually enter the immense cavity of his inside, where they continue mining away with their assegais, and handing the fat to their comrades outside until all is bare. While this is transpiring with the sides and intestines, other parties are equally active in removing the skin and flesh from the remaining parts of the carcass.
“The natives have a horrid practice on these occasions of besmearing their bodies, from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot, with the black and clotted gore; and in this anointing they assist one another, each man taking up the fill of both his hands, and spreading it over the back and shoulders of his friend. Throughout the entire proceeding, an incessant and deafening clamour of many voices and confused sounds is maintained, and violent jostling and wrestling are practised by every man, elbowing the breasts and faces of his fellows, all slippery with gore, as he endeavours to force his way to the flesh through the dense intervening ranks, while the sharp and ready assegai gleams in every hand. The angry voices and gory appearances of these naked savages, combined with their excited and frantic gestures and glistening arms, presented an effect so wild and striking that, when I first beheld the scene, I contemplated it in the momentary expectation of beholding one-half of the gathering turn their weapons against the other.
“The trunk and feet of the Elephant are considered a great delicacy, and are baked in holes in the earth, which have been heated by fires burnt in them. The flesh of the Elephant is then cut into strips, varying from six to twenty feet, and about two inches in breadth and thickness. It is then placed on poles, and allowed to dry in the sun for two or three days, after which it is packed into bundles, each man carrying off his share to his wife and family.”
FOSSIL ELEPHANTS AND THEIR ALLIES.
The Proboscidea, represented, as we have already seen, by two species only among living animals, both of which are met with in and near the tropical regions of the Old World, in the fossil state are met with over nearly the whole of the Old World, and of the New; and are divided into three genera—Elephas, Mastodon, and Dinotherium.
The teeth and bones of these creatures found in Europe were assigned in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries to giants, and many are the stories which were commonly reported about them—as, for example, that of the giant of Dauphiné, in the reign of Louis XIV. His remains were discovered by a surgeon, who stated that they were enclosed in an enormous sepulchre covered with a stone slab, bearing the inscription Teutobochus rex; and that in the vicinity there were also found coins or medals, all of which showed the remains to be those of a giant king of the Cimbri, who fought against Marius. However, the original owner of these bones, though not of the coins, was proved to have been an Elephant.
The story of Teutobochus is even excelled by that of another giant, called the giant of Lucerne, whose remains when dug up were examined by a celebrated Professor of Basle, who described them as of human origin, and was skilful enough to put them together so as to resemble a giant no less than twenty-six feet high. For some time the deluded people of Lucerne paid homage to this Elephantine prodigy, until the scales were removed from their eyes by Blumenbach, who pronounced to their astonished senses that the giant, as it lay in state at the Jesuits’ College, was but the skeleton of an Elephant.
The Tertiary or third great period into which the geologists divide the life history of the earth consists of the following divisions:—Eocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene, Prehistoric, and Historic, and it is in the Pliocene stage that the Elephant first appears in Europe and America.
The large, straight-tusked Elephant (E. meridionalis), with large grinders composed of thick and coarse plates, is found ranged over the whole of France, Italy, Britain, and Germany in those times, in company with another narrow-toothed species, also with straight tusks, described by Dr. Falconer under the name of Elephas antiquus.