62 



NATURAL SCIENCE. 



that the author has felt liimself compelled to make this change in 

 nomenclature, seeing that the name E. indicus was published by 

 Linnaeus in 1754, although in the " Syst. Nat.'" of 1766 both the 

 Indian and African species were included under the common title of 

 E. maxiimts. Apart, however, from such questions, we may venture 

 to hope that the emphatic statement by Mr. Blanford that elephants 

 are furnished with deciduous milk-tusks, which precede the large 

 permanent tusks, will for the future spare us from sentences like the 

 following, which we extract from Mr. Sanderson's " Thirteen Years 

 among the Wild Beasts of India," where it is stated in reference to the 

 occurrence of these milk-tusks, that "the error — as it undoubtedly is 

 — has arisen through some savant's diagnosis of the elephant's dentition, 

 based on analogy, or the confounding the teeth and the tusks, as the 

 same word is used to denote either in several languages." With 

 regard to the question of the height attained by the Indian elephant, 

 Mr, Blanford observes that adult males do not, as a rule, exceed nine 

 feet ; he quotes, however, Mr. Sanderson as having measured one 



The Javan Rhinoceros (Rhinoceros sondaicus). 



individual of 10 feet 7^ inches, while the late Sir Victor Brooke is 

 reported to have killed another of upwards of 1 1 feet in height. A 

 mounted skeleton of an Indian elephant in the museum at Calcutta 

 measures, however, as much as 11 feet 3 inches in height, and if 

 correctly articulated would indicate a height of some 12 feet in the 

 living condition ; but Mr. Sanderson states that he found the thigh 

 bone in that skeleton was scarcely longer than that of an elephant of 

 less than 10 feet, so that further investigations are required before these 

 extreme dimensions can be definitely accepted. 



Passing on to the Perissodactyle Ungulates, we may note that 

 Mr. Blanford regards all the wild asses of Asia as referable to a 

 single species — Equiis hemioims. Of the Rhinoceroses, Mr. Blanford 

 figures two out of the three Indian species ; and, as we have already 

 mentioned, these figures — of which we reproduce one — may be cited 

 as excellent examples of illustration by " process." Although the 

 author mentions that the lower tusks of the rhinoceros are regarded 



