MENTAL CAPACITY OF THE ELEPHANT. 499 



becomes necessary to accumulate evidence in his favor, the task will be 

 a simple and easy one. 



iElian and Pliny describe the performances of African elephants 

 in the amphitheatre at Home, the former with considerable detail. 

 African elephants were used by the Carthaginians in their wars with 

 the Romans, but it is stated by the historian Armandi that, from in- 

 experienced and deficient training, they proved less effective than the 

 elephants of India. 



A gentleman who lately arrived in this city from the west coast of 

 Africa informed the writer that he had just seen at St. Paul de Loanda 

 an African elephant, considerably larger and older than Jumbo, at work 

 loading timbers into a ship, and that the animal performed his tasks 

 with surprising intelligence and precision. 



The Indian elephant's reputation for mental superiority over the 

 African is apparently due to accidental circumstances. It is true that 

 trained elephants of the former species outnumber the African by per- 

 haps more than sixty to one, but it is also true that in Africa the in- 

 habitants are mostly negro savages who have neither the resources, 

 intelligence, nor inclination necessary to the wholesale capture and 

 domestication of elephants. Unlike the inhabitants of Hindostan, 

 Ceylon, Burmah, and Siam, who from time immemorial have made a 

 business of the capture and training of wild elephants, the negroes of 

 Africa look upon the elephant only as an ivory-producer. The splendid 

 tusks of Africanus make his total extermination only a question of 

 time. Long before the world will have reached the necessity of util- 

 izing this animal as a beast of burden, the ivory hunters will have 

 finished their war of extermination, now being waged with such alarm- 

 ing success, and the chances are that the zoologist of the future will 

 describe this animal as so entirely inferior to the Indian species, both 

 in intelligence and temper, that only a few individuals were ever suc- 

 cessfully trained. It is the misfortune of Africanus that he belongs 

 to the undeveloped continent. Two centuries hence, when the last of 

 his race goes to join the mammoth and the mastodon, his captive con- 

 gener in India will still be devouring his four hundred pounds of green 

 fodder per day, in peaceful domestication, while in the jungles, the 

 progeny of the wild herds which now roam the forests, secure from 

 destruction under the stringent English laws, will still be protected 

 for the perpetuation of the species. 



The intelligence of an animal may be measured by taking into 

 account, separately, its intellectual qualities, as follows : 



1. Powers of independent reasoning or observation. 



2. Memory. 



3. Comprehension under tuition. 



4. Accuracy in the execution of man's orders. 



Closely allied to these are the moral qualities which go to make up 

 an animal's temperament and disposition, about as follows : 



