The Indian Elephant.-Elephas Indicus, CUVIER. IN the year 1681 an elephant was accidentally destroyed by fire, in a booth, in the city of Dublin; "and when the fire was extinguished, every one endeavoured to procure some part of the elephant, few of them having seen him living, by reason of the great rates put upon the sight of himt." We men* From a young female in Mr. Cross's Menagerie, in 1828. +Anatomical account of the Elephant accidentally burnt in Dublin, 1682. tion this circumstance to contrast it with the familiar acquaintance which almost every child of the present day has with this quadruped. A century and a half ago, the elephant was rarely brought to these islands; and, for this reason, the multitude had not only extravagant ideas of the intelligence of this most interesting animal, but believed a great many absurdities regarding it, which opportunities of observation would have speedily eradicated. Thus, when Sir Thomas Brown wrote his Enquiries into vulgar and common Errors," he states it to have been the prevalent opinion up to his time (about 1670) that the elephant had no joints, and that it never lay down. In a very curious specimen of our early natural history, "The Dialogues of Creatures Moralyzed," mention is made of "the olefawnte that boweth not the knees." In an old play printed in 1633, a woman is described as "stubborn as an elephant's leg―no bending in her ;" and Shakspeare makes Ulysses, in Troilus and Cressida, say, "the elephant hath joints, but none for courtesy: his legs are legs for necessity, not for flexure." These passages shew the extent of the popular notion; to refute which Sir T. Brown appeals to experience, "whereof not many years past we have had the advantage in England, by an elephant shewn in many parts thereof, not only in the posture of standing, but kneeling and lying down*.' This exhibition appears to have produced the beneficial effects of all direct appeals to the senses, with respect to errors which are capable of being refuted by such a test; for it seems that the false opinions regarding the elephant were "well suppressed," by the demonstration that he had no difficulty in assuming those positions which, on account of his bulk, were affirmed to be impossible. Sir Thomas Brown, however, dreads the revival of *Book iii. chap. 1. the error, in the next generation, "from some strings of tradition;" for he argues, that as this was not the first elephant that had been seen in England, the effect of the truth might wear away, as it had before yielded to vulgar prejudice. It is quite clear, both from the general tone in which this writer mentions the subject, and from the particular facts upon record, that elephants were scarcely known in Europe as recently as the middle of the seventeenth century. Lewis IX. of France, indeed, sent an elephant to our Henry III., which was probably procured from some of the African chiefs, at the period when the French king invaded Palestine by the way of Egypt. This elephant was kept in the Tower of London; and with somewhat more of comfort to himself, as to the space in which he was confined, than the pent-up animals of our modern menageries: for the king, in a precept to the sheriff of London, in 1256, says, “we command you, that, of the farm of our city, ye cause, without delay, to be built at our Tower of London, one house of forty feet long, and twenty feet deep, for our elephant*." Emanuel of Portugal, also, sent a remarkable elephant to Pope Leo X., which was exhibited at Rome; and Cardan, about the same period (the beginning of the sixteenth century), describes an elephant which he had seen at the court of the Queen of Bohemia, the daughter of the Emperor Charles V. With the additional exception of an elephant, which was sent to Charlemagne, in the year 802, by Haroun Al Raschid, caliph of the Saracens, there is no account of the animal being brought to Europe, after the time when the early Byzantine monarchs, in imitation of the princes who reigned before the division of the Roman empire, exhibited him to the people in the cruel sports of the Circus. * Maitland's London, vol. i. p. 171.-Edit. 1772. + Physicæ Curiosæ, p. 1024, |