In 1730, or 1731, some workmen digging the great sewer in Pall Mall, “over against the King’s Arms tavern,” discovered at the depth of twenty-eight feet, several bones of an elephant. The strata below the surface were ten or twelve feet of artificial soil; below that four or five feet of yellow sand, varying in colour till they came to the bed wherein the bones were found, which consisted of exceedingly fine sand similar to that dug on Hampstead heath.
About eighteen years previously, elephants’ bones were discovered in digging in St. James’s-square; and about fourteen years before that some were found in the same place. These various animal remains in that neighbourhood lay at about the same depth.
In 1740, the remains of an elephant were discovered by some labourers while digging a trench in the park of Frances Biddulph, esq. at Benton, in Sussex. The bones did not lie close together as those of a skeleton usually do. It was evident that the various parallel strata of the earth had never been disturbed; it was concluded that these animal deposits had remained there from the period of the deluge, when it was presumed that they had been conveyed and there, left, on the subsidence of the waters.
In 1756, the workmen of a gentleman, digging upon a high hill near Mendip for ochre and ore, discovered, at the depth of 315 feet from the surface, four teeth, not tusks, and two thighbones with part of the head of an elephant. Remains of the same animal have been at periods discovered at Mersey Island in Essex, at Harwich, at Chartham near Canterbury, at Bowden Parva, in Norfolk, Suffolk, Northamptonshire, and in various other parts of Great Britain and Ireland. Elephant’s teeth were discovered at Islington, in digging a gravel pit.
Shakspeare, in “Troilus and Cressida,” compares the slowness of Ajax to that of the elephant; and in the same play he again compares him to the same animal, and afterwards continues the comparison.
There is reason to believe, that the elephant was adopted at that period as the sign of a public inn. Antonio in “Twelfth Night” tells Sebastian,—
“In the south suburbs at the Elephant
Is best to lodge: I will bespeak our diet,
While you beguile your time.”