378 MaAmMatiA OF INDIA. 
performances in the arena, and swelled the pomp of military triumphs, 
when, as Macaulay, I think, in his ‘ Lays of Ancient Rome,’ says, the 
people wondered at— 
‘* The monstrous beast that had 
A serpent for a hand.” 
It seems a cruel shame, when one comes to think of it, that thousands 
of these noble animals should perish annually by all sorts of ignoble 
means—pitfalls, hamstringing, poisoned arrows, and a few here and 
there shot with more or less daring by adventurous sportsmen, only for 
the sake of their magnificent tusks. 
Few people think, as they leisurely cut open the pages of a new book 
or play with their ivory-handled dessert-knives after dinner, of the life 
that has once been the lot of that inanimate substance, so beautiful in 
its texture, so prized from time immemorial ; still less do they think, for 
the majority do not know, of the enormous loss of life entailed in 
purveying this luxury for the market. An elephant isa long-lived beast; 
itis difficult to say what is the extent of its individual existence ; at fifty 
years it is in its prime, and its reproduction is in ratio slower than 
animals of shorter life, yet what countless herds must there be in Central 
Africa when we consider that the annual requirements of Sheffield alone 
are reported to be upwards of 46,000 tusks, which represent 23,000 
elephants a year for the commerce of one single city! The African 
elephant must be decreasing, even as it has been extirpated in the north 
of that continent, where it abounded in the time of the Carthaginians, 
and the time may come when ivory shall be counted as one of the 
precious things of the past. Even now the price is going up, and is 
nearly double what it was a year ago. Now enhanced price means. 
either greater demand or deficient supply, and it is probably to this last 
we must look for an answer to the question. True it is that if we want 
ivory animals must be killed to get it, for the notion that some people 
have gained from obsolete works on natural history, to the effect that 
elephants shed their tusks, is an erroneous one. It is generally supposed 
that elephants do not shed their tusks at all, not even milk-teeth, but that 
they grow abd initio, as do the incisors of rodents, from a persistent pulp, 
and continue growing through life. Mr. G. P. Sanderson, the author of 
‘ Thirteen Years among the Wild Beasts,’ whom I have to thank for much 
and valuable information about the habits of these animals, assured 
me, when I spoke to him about the popular idea of there being milk- 
tusks, that he had watched elephants from their birth, and had never 
known them to shed their tusks, nor had his mahouts ever found a shed 
tusk ; but Mr. Tegetmeier has pointed out that there are skulls in the 
museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, showing both the milk and_ 
permanent tusks, the latter pushing forward the former, which are 
absorbed to a great extent, and leave nothing but a little blackened 
