African Elephant. Elephas Africanus. CUVIER.

BEFORE the settlements of the Portuguese on the coasts of Africa, in the latter part of the fifteenth century, the elephant ranged without much interrup

tion, on the banks of the great rivers, whose courses, even at our own days, have not been completely traced. In the plains of the kingdom of Congo, where the herbage attains a wild luxuriance amidst innumerable lakes, and on the borders of the Senegal, whose waters run through extensive forests, herds of elephants had wandered for ages in security. The poor African, indeed, occasionally destroyed a few stragglers, to obtain a rare and luxurious feast of the more delicate parts of their flesh; and the desire for ornament, which prevails even in the rudest forms of savage life, rendered the chiefs of the native hordes anxious to possess the tusk of the elephant, to convert it into armlets and other fanciful embellishments of their persons. Superstition, too, occasionally prompted the destruction of this powerful animal; for the tail of the elephant had become an object of reverence, and therefore of distinction to its possessor: and the huntsman, accordingly, devoted himself, with as much ferocity as the hyæna-dog that gnaws off the tail of the ox and the sheep during their unprotected repose*, to steal upon the unsuspecting elephant in his pasture, and to cut off his tail with a single stroke of his rugged hatchet †. But these were irregular and partial incentives to the destruction of the most mighty, and, at the same time, the most peaceful inhabitant of the woods. The steady and inexorable demands of commerce had not yet come to the shores of Africa, to raise up enemies to him in all the tribes amongst whom he had so long lived in a state of comparative security. The trade in ivory had been suspended for more than a thousand years. There were periods, indeed, in

* See Menageries, vol. i. p. 125.

Voyage de Merolla, quoted in Histoire Generale des Voyages, tom. v. p. 79.

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the history of the refined nations of antiquity, when this destruction of the elephant was as great as in modern times when Africa yielded her tributes of elephants' teeth to the kings of Persia*; when the people of Judæa built "ivory palaces†;" when the gallies of Tyre had "benches of ivory‡;" when, contributing to the barbarous luxury of the early Grecian princes,

"The spoils of elephants the roofs inlay §;"

when the Etruscan attributes of royalty were sceptres and thrones of ivory ||; when the ancient kings and magistrates of Rome sat in ivory seats; when colossal ivory statues of their gods, far exceeding, in their vast proportions and their splendid ornaments, all the magnificence of the moderns, were raised by the Greeks of the age of Pericles; and when immense stores of ivory, to be employed with similar prodigality, were collected in the temples **. In the time of Pliny, the vast consumption of ivory for articles of luxury had compelled the Romans to seek for it in another hemisphere; Africa had ceased to furnish elephants' tusks, except of the smallest kind tt. A century or two earlier, according to Polybius, ivory was so plentiful in Africa, that the tribes on the confines of Ethiopia employed elephants' tusks as door-posts, and for the palisades that enclosed their fields ‡‡. When the Roman power fell into decay, and the commerce of Europe with Africa was nearly suspended for centuries, the elephant was again unmolested in those regions. He was no

*Herodotus, Thalia. Elephant's teeth is the name in commerce for what are more accurately called défenses or tusks—the substance of ivory.

† Psalm xlv. 8. Ezek. xxvii. 6. Dionys. Halicar., lib. iii., cap. 18. **Cicero de Signis, par. 46. †† See Plin., lib. viii., cap. 10.

§ Odyssey, lib. iv., v. 73. I ĺbid., lib. v., cap. iv. Hist. Nat., lib. viii,, cap. 2.

longer slaughtered to administer to the pomp of temples, or to provide ornaments for palaces. The ivory tablets of the citizens of ancient Rome (libri elephantini) had fallen into disuse; and the toys of modern France were constructed of less splendid materials *. At Angola, elephants' teeth had become so plentiful, because so useless as an article of trade, that in the beginning of the seventeenth century, according to Andrew Battell, an Englishman, who served in the Portuguese armies, the natives "had their idols of wood in the midst of their towns, fashioned like a negro, and at the foot thereof was a great heap of elephants' teeth, containing three or four tons of them: these were piled in the earth, and upon them were set the skulls of dead men, which they had slain in the wars, in monument of their victory +." The people of Angola and Congo, when the Portuguese first established themselves there, were found to have preserved an immense number of elephants' teeth, for centuries, and had applied them to such superstitious uses. As long as any part of the stock remained, the vessels of Portugal carried large quantities to Europe; and this traffic formed one of the most profitable branches of the early trade with Africa +. About the middle of the seventeenth century the store was exhausted. But the demand for ivory which had been thus renewed in Europe, after the lapse of so many centuries, offered too great a temptation to the poor African to be allowed by him to remain without a supply. The destruction of elephants for their teeth was again unremittingly pursued throughout those extensive forests; and that

*Dieppe has been for several centuries the great manufactory of ivory ornaments. † Purchas, book vii., chap. 9. See Hist. des Voyages, vol. v., p. 79.

havoc has gone on with little, if any, diminution, to our own day.

It would be exceedingly difficult to estimate with any pretension to accuracy the present consumption of ivory in Europe. Its use must have been considerably diminished, on the one hand, by the changes of taste, which have dispensed with the ivory beds, and ivory chairs, that adorned the palaces of princes in the age of Leo X.; and have displaced the inlaid tables and cabinets of a century later, by articles of furniture distinguished rather for the excellence of their workmanship than for the cost of their material. But, on the other hand, the increase of comforts and luxuries amongst the middle classes of society, and the love of tasteful ornament which has descended from the palace to the cottage (one satisfactory symptom of intellectual advancement) has probably increased the consumption of ivory in smaller articles. We understand that at Dieppe there are at present eleven flourishing manufactories of articles in ivory, from which various specimens of art, from the commonest piece of turnery to the most elaborate carving, are dispersed throughout the continent. Much is employed for crucifixes, and other appendages of Roman Catholic worship. In our own country the demand for elephants' teeth, to be employed in the manufacture of musical instruments, plates for miniatures, boxes, chess-men, billiard-balls, mathematical rules, and small pieces of carving*, is much more consi

* Works in ivory have hitherto been executed as carving, in which art the eye alone is depended on for accuracy, and false strokes are irremediable. However great the abilities of the artist, he has never been able to produce any results so satisfactory as those of the modeller, because his material is not plastic; or as those of the sculptor, because hitherto he has had no model to work from: and he does not, even in the case of his making a