494 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



spatched with a sword, which, after being secured upon the end of a rifle, was 

 plunged into his neck. The quantity of blood that flowed was very considera- 

 ble, and flooded the den to a great depth. This was the same elephant who was 

 the accidental cause of its keeper's death, whose ribs it crushed four months 

 back while in the act of turning round in its den. 



After reading this account, we may well feel tempted to indorse 

 the opinion of a correspondent of " Land and Water," who remarks 

 that the like of it " can never occur again, thank God, in England ! " 



The history of the elephants would be manifestly imperfect, even 

 when detailed in the briefest manner, without a reference to their 

 present distribution and to the biography of the race in the past. As 

 in the case of many other groups of animals and plants, we can only 

 fully aj:>preciate the modern relations of the elephants w T hen some 

 knowledge of their development in the geological ages has been ob- 

 tained. In the eyes of the modern naturalist, the present of any liv- 

 ing being is not merely bound up in its past development, but the 

 existing conditions of any race become explicable in many cases only 

 w T hen the former range of the group in time has been ascertained. 

 This holds especially true of the elephants ; for the existing species 

 represent the remnants of a once larger and far more extensive dis- 

 tribution of proboscidian life. Hence, it behooves us to make the ac- 

 quaintance, firstly, of their present distribution, and secondly of their 

 distribution and development in past ages, if we are to understand 

 w r ith any degree of completeness and mental satisfaction the relations 

 of the elephantine races. 



The distribution of the elephant on the earth as it now exists may 

 be disposed of in a very few words. The Indian species occurs in 

 Asia, from the Himalayas to Ceylon, while its range extends eastward 

 to the Chinese borders, and southward to Sumatra and Borneo as well. 

 The African species possesses as localized a habitat. It w T as Swift 

 w T ho, remarking on the customs of geographers in his day, said : 



" So geographers in Afric maps 

 "With savage pictures fill their gaps, 

 And o'er unhabitable downs 

 Place elephants for want of towns." 



The witty dean's lines show at least that the geographers did not mis- 

 take the wide distribution of the giant animal in the Ethiopian conti- 

 nent. For, south of the Sahara the territory north of which is zoo- 

 logically' a part of Europe the African elephant is everywhere found, 

 forming one of the most characteristic features at once of the African 

 landscape and of the Ethiopian fauna, and dividing the sovereignty of 

 the land with the lion himself. 



Turning now to the past history of the elephant race, one may pri- 

 marily note the more prominent members of the group wdiich rank 

 among the curiosities of the geologist. First in order comes the ex- 

 tinct mammoth the JElephas primigenius (Fig. 3) of the naturalist. 



