5 o8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



When commanded by man, the elephant will tear a criminal limb 

 from limb, or crush him to death with his knees, or go out to battle 

 holding a cimeter in his trunk. He will, when told to do so, attack 

 his kind with fury and persistence ; but, in the course of many hours, 

 or even days, spent in watching wild herds, I never yet saw a single 

 individual show any signs of impatience or ill-temper toward his fel- 

 lows. 



It is safe to say that, thus far, not one half the elephant's mental 

 capabilities have been developed or even understood. It would be of 

 great interest to determine by experiment the full educational capacity 

 of this interesting quadruped, and, but for the lack of a permanent 

 menagerie in this city, it would ere now have been undertaken. It 

 would be equally interesting to determine the exact limit of its reason- 

 ing powers in applied mechanics. An animal that can turn a hand- 

 organ with regularity at the proper speed, can be taught to push a 

 smoothing-plane invented purposely for him ; but whether he would 

 learn of himself to plane the rough surfaces smooth, and let the smooth 

 ones remain untouched, is an open question. 



While it is generally fruitless and unsatisfactory to enter the field 

 of speculation, I can not resist the temptation to assert my belief that 

 an elephant can be taught to read written characters, and also to ex- 

 press some of his own thoughts or states of feeling in writing. It 

 would be a perfectly simple matter to prepare suitable appliances by 

 which the sagacious animal could hold a crayon in his trunk, and mark 

 upon a surface adapted to his convenience. In iElian's work on " The 

 Nature of Animals," eleventh chapter of the second book, he describes 

 in detail the wonderful performances of elephants at Rome, all of 

 which he saw. One passage is of peculiar interest to us, and the fol- 

 lowing is a translation of it : " . . . I saw them writing letters on 

 Roman tablets with their trunks, neither looking awry nor turning 

 aside. The hand, however, of the teacher was placed so as to be a 

 guide in the formation of the letters ; and, while it was writing, the 

 animal kept its eye fixed down in an accomplished and scholar-like 

 manner." 



I can conceive how an elephant may be taught that certain charac- 

 ters represent certain ideas, and that they are capable of intelligent 

 combination. The system and judgment and patient effort which de- 

 veloped an active, educated, and even refined intellect in Laura Bridg- 

 man deaf, dumb, and blind from birth ought certainly to be able to 

 teach a clear-headed, intelligent elephant to express at least some of 

 his thoughts in writing. In this way it may, some day, be possible to 

 open a channel for the communication of thought between man and 

 the lower animals ; in this way it may be possible to prove, beyond 

 all possibility of dispute, the presence of the true reasoning faculty in 

 other animals than man. That it does exist, to a greater or less de- 

 gree, in all vertebrate animals, I have no doubt whatever. I believe 



