The ivory king

In the history of nearly all animals, there will be found associated some curious fiction.

In Burmah and Siam, the white elephant is supposed, by some, to be the abode of a transmigratory Buddha; and in India, certain elephants with a single right tusk are reverenced. In China, the tusks of the mammoth are used in medicine; and in some of the old works, the mammoth itself is described as a huge rat, which lives under the ground in burrows, formed by the tusks, or teeth. The origin of this fable lies in the fact, that, as mammoths were always found beneath the surface, it was assumed, that, when alive, they lived there. Early anatomists stated that the elephant’s head was a storehouse for the water which it blew out of its trunk.

It was formerly believed that elephants shed their tusks, as do deer their horns. Ælian says that they drop them once in ten years, which, all things considered, is quite often enough. Pliny repeats the story, but adds some private information of his own, to the effect that they always hid their tusks underground.

This curious error has found its way into many comparatively modern works: thus, Sir William Jardine states, in the naturalist’s library, that “the tusks are shed about the twelfth or the tenth year.”

Many strange beliefs were entertained regarding the elephant of Ceylon. Travellers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Pyrard, Bernier, and Phillipe, stated that this elephant was the superior of all others in India, both physically and mentally; and Tavernier is supposed to be authority for the statement, that, if a Ceylon elephant be introduced among others, the latter will instinctively do him homage by touching the ground with their trunks.

Phile records the fact that elephants have two hearts. He argued that this was so, because the animal showed extremes of temperament,—one heart controlling the beast when good-humored and docile, and the other when it exhibited the characteristics of the rogue.

The older naturalists had few opportunities for making careful anatomical examinations of the elephant, and, naturally, fell into many errors; one of which was, that elephants from sixteen to twenty feet high were not uncommon. Major Denman observed some in Africa which he “guessed” were sixteen feet high; though he afterwards measured one that had been killed, which was twelve feet six inches at the back. Works were published in the last century, which gave the height of the animal as from twelve to fifteen feet; and Sir John Hill, M.D., in his “Natural History of Animals,” 1752, states that elephants were said to measure, when full grown, twenty feet at the shoulder.

It is needless to say that this was a gross exaggeration. Reference has been made, in a previous chapter, to the size of elephants; and it will be found that a twelve-foot animal is an extreme rarity. The skeleton that is preserved in the St. Petersburg museum, which is said to stand sixteen feet and a half high, is the tallest known, being a foot taller than the skeleton of the fossil elephant which was discovered at Jubbalpore. It is doubtful if the European mammoth or the American form, Elephas Americanus,—a tooth of which is shown in Plate I.,—attained this height. One of the largest elephant skeletons to be seen in this country belongs to the Chicago Medical College, and represents an elephant shot in a gorge of the Himalaya Mountains, about a thousand miles from Calcutta, in 1865. Its dimensions are as follows:—

The following are measurements of a large African male elephant, made by Thomas Baines, F.R.G.S., which show the average dimensions of an animal of the largest size:—

Some extremely interesting measurements have been made of the skeleton of the elephant Jumbo, by Professor Ward of Rochester, who compares them, in a pamphlet, with a skeleton of the Mastodon giganteus, discovered at Orange County, N.Y. It is too lengthy and technical to be introduced in this connection. The measurements already given are sufficient to show that the elephants of over eleven or twelve feet are extremely rare, while those of eighteen and twenty belong to the world of fiction.

The absence of joints was a feature of the elephant, according to some of the old writers. Sir Thomas Browne, in his “Pseudodoxia Epidemica,” says, “It hath no joynts;” and “being unable to lye down, it lieth against a tree, which the hunters observing doe saw almost asunder, whereon the beast relying, by the fall of the tree falls also downe itselfe, and is able to rise no more.” Sir Thomas thinks that “the hint and ground of this opinion might be the grosse and somewhat cylindrical composure of the legs of the elephant, and the equality and less perceptible disposure of the joynts, especially in the fore-legs of the animal, they appearing, when he standeth, like pillars of flesh.”

The honor of discovering jointless animals belongs properly to Pliny, who described the machlis, a Scandinavian animal without joints. Cæsar, in describing the wild animals of the Hercynian forests, mentions the alce, “in color and configuration approaching the goat, but surpassing it in size, its head destitute of horns, and its limbs of joints.” It is evident that Aristotle had some doubt as to whether elephants possessed joints in their knees; and Ælian, writing two hundred years later, perpetuated the error, expressing his surprise that the elephants in Rome could dance, when they had no joints. This fiction was taken up by the poets of the time, and is found in many old writings. Phile, a contemporary of Dante, addressed a poem on the elephant to the Emperor Andross II., in which he expressed the same belief; and Solinus introduced it into his fable “Polyhistor.” Though the error was corrected in the year 802, it was revived by Matthew Paris in the thirteenth century, who made a drawing of the elephant presented to King Henry III. by the King of France, in 1255. The animal was represented without joints.

Shakspeare was a victim to the popular belief, and says in “Troilus and Cressida,”—

Donne, in his “Progress of a Soul,” sang of nature’s great masterpiece, an elephant,—

I have previously referred to the fact that the mammoth was considered by the Chinese to be an underground, rat-like creature; and in many countries the bones of fossil elephants have been considered those of giants.

In the time of James II., Lord Cherbury was appointed by the king to investigate some bones which had been unearthed near Gloucester; and there was much discussion about them. Many considered them to be the remains of a giant, but scientific men proved them to be those of an elephant.

In the reign of Louis XIII., the scientific world was greatly excited over the remains of an alleged giant, which were dug up in Dauphiné; and so divided was public opinion, that the doctors took sides against one another, some claiming that they were the bones of the giant Tentobrochus. One doctor, named Mazurier, exhibited the remains in Paris, and stated in a pamphlet that they were found in a sepulchre thirty feet long, on the upper stone of which was written Tentobrochus rex, the name of the king of Cimbri, who fought against Marius.

In 1577 a gigantic skeleton of an elephant was unearthed in Lucerne; and Professor Felix Pläten of Basle made an examination, by order of the council, and concluded that it was the skeleton of a man nineteen feet in height. The natives of Lucerne were exceedingly proud of this. Goliath was only eleven feet tall; and the giant Gabbarus of Pliny, who lived in the time of Claudius, was about ten feet; but these were pygmies compared to this ancestor of the people of Lucerne, and they determined to commemorate his memory in a fitting manner, namely, in employing a representation to support the arms of the city. The design was made by Professor Pläten; and some of the original bones are still to be seen in the museum of the Jesuit college in Lucerne.

As late as 1645, the skeleton of an elephant found at Crems in Austria was considered a giant; though Dr. Behrens argued that such could not be the case, as “the tallest man we know of was Og of Basan, whose bed is said, in Deuteronomy, chap. iii., to have been eighteen feet long: now, allowing the bed to be but one foot longer than the man, he was seventeen feet high.”

Even in the last century, the doctors of Germany prescribed as an absorbent, astringent, and sudorific, the “Ebur fossile,” or “Unicornu fossile,” which was merely the tusk of an elephant.

In the present days, few believers in these old fables can be found: the stories of the milk and hoop snakes, the nautilus and its sails, and other pleasant fictions, seem to have superseded them.

Shakspeare judges this class perhaps not unfairly in “The Tempest,” when he says,—