X1X 
extracted from the Report of a recent meeting of the Zoological 
Society :— 
“Mr. Sclater exhibited a pair of tusks of a female Indian elephant 
(Elephas indicus), which presented the appearance of having been corroded 
or eaten away in the basal portion, immediately adjacent to the end pro- 
jecting from the gums. Just below this, on the outer side of each tusk, was 
deposited a mass of egg-like bodies arranged in regular series, apparently of 
some dipterous insect, and somewhat resembling those of the common blow- 
fly (Musca vomitoria). These tusks had been submitted to Mr. Bartlett for 
examination by Mr. G. S. Roden, of the 1st Royals, lately stationed in 
India, who had communicated to Mr. Sclater the following note on the 
subject :—‘ The tusks which I left with Mr. Bartlett belonged to a female 
elephant, which I shot last June at a place called Muddry, at the foot of the 
Manantowady Mountains in Malabar. Directly after shooting her I lifted 
up her lips to see the size of the tusks, and then noticed the deposit of eggs 
on them. I had them carefully cut out. On cleaning the tusks afterwards 
I noticed that they had been eaten away at the ends, and also near where 
the white eggs were. There were no maggots in the grooves at the end of 
the tusks; they were merely filled up with some dark dry clay, just the same 
_as what you now see the eggs now surrounded by. ‘The tusks have been 
slightly polished over, but I took great care that the eggs should not be 
touched.’ Mr. Sclater remarked that a previous notice of the same pheno- 
menon had appeared in a letter addressed to the ‘ Field’ newspaper on the 
12th of March last, signed by a well-known Indian sportsman, under the 
pseudonym of ‘Smoothbore’:—‘ Has any zoologist or microscopist ever 
noticed how the tusks of female elephants are attacked and eaten away by 
some parasite? and is it not most singular that this has never been observed 
in the tusks of the male?’ Mr. Sclater added that he had been informed 
by Prof. Flower that- there was an exactly similar pair of tusks in the 
Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, but that he had hitherto sought 
in vain for any information as to the name of this extraordinary parasite 
that was able to digest ivory.” 
The eggs in question were each about 1’”’ in length, hence of enormous 
bulk as compared with those of Musca vomitoria. 
Mr. M‘Lachlan was of opinion that the decay of the tusk was not directly 
traceable to the larve produced from these eggs, and therefore there was 
no evidence that the insect “digested” ivory. He thought rather that the 
parasite took advantage of an already diseased condition, and possibly fed 
upon the morbid secretions thereby generated. Prof. Westwood thought 
that possibly the habit was not a normal one, and that the parasites had 
simply been attracted by the disease, in the same way that flies frequent 
festering wounds. Dr. Sclater desired information as to what creature 
