ABOUT ELEPHANTS, 481 



strength at least. As the existing pearly nautilus is the sole survivor 

 of the immense hordes of four-gilled and shelled cuttle-fishes which 

 swarmed in the primitive seas and oceans of our earth, or as the few 

 living " lampshells," or Brachiopods, represent in themselves the full- 

 ness of a life that crowded the Silurian seas, so the two existing spe- 

 cies of elephants with which we are familiar to-day stand forth among 

 quadrupeds as the representatives of a comparatively plentiful past 

 population of these mammalian giants. The causes which have de- 

 populated the earth of its elephantine tenants may be alluded to here- 

 after ; but it is evident that neither size nor strength avails against 

 the operation of those physical environments which so powerfully 

 affect the ways and destinies of man and monad alike. One highly 

 important feature of elephant organization may, however, be noted 

 even in these preliminary details respecting the modern scarcity of 

 elephantine species, namely, that the slow increase of the race, and, 

 as compared with other animals at least, the resulting paucity of num- 

 bers, must have had their own share as conditions affecting the exist- 

 ence of these huge animals. The elephants are, of all known animals, 

 the slowest to increase in numbers. At the earliest, the female ele- 

 phant does not become a parent until the age of thirty years, and only 

 six young are capable of being produced during the parental period, 

 which appears to cease at ninety years of age ; the average duration 

 of elephant-life being presumed to be about a hundred years. But it 

 is most interesting, as well as important, in view of any speculation 

 on the increase of species and on the question of competition among 

 the races of animal life, to reflect that, given favorable conditions of 

 existence, such as a sufficiency of food, a freedom from disease and 

 from the attack of enemies, and the elephant race, slow of increase 

 as it is, would come in a few thousand years to stock the entire world 

 with its huge representatives. On the data afforded by the foregoing 

 details of the age at which these animals produce young, and of their 

 parental period, it is easy to calculate that in from seven hundred and 

 forty to seven hundred and fifty years, nineteen million elephants 

 would remain to represent a natural population. If such a contin- 

 gency awaits even a slowly increasing race such as the elephants un- 

 questionably are, the powerful nature of the adverse conditions which 

 have ousted their kith and kin from a place among living quadrupeds 

 can readily be conceived. In the face of such facts, the contention 

 that the " struggle for existence," in lopping off the weak and allow- 

 ing the strong to survive, accomplishes in its way an actual good be- 

 comes- clear. And the important biological lesson is also enforced,, 

 that there is a tolerably deep meed of philosophy involved in the Lau- 

 reate's pertinent remark concerning the " secret meaning " of the deeds. 

 of Nature, through 



"finding that of fifty seeds 

 She often brings but one to bear." 

 tol. xxi. l 



