TJic Wild Elephant. 



With the exception of the nan-ow but densely inha- 

 bited belt of cultivated land, that extends along the 

 seaborde from Chilaw on the western coast towards 

 Tangalle on the south-east, there is no part of Ceylon 

 in which elephants may not be said to abound ; even 

 close to the environs of the most populous localities of 

 the interior. They frequent both the open plains and 

 the deep forests ; and their footsteps are to be seen 

 wherever food and shade, vegetation and water,* allure 



' M. Ad. Pictet has availed him- 

 self of the love of the elephant for 

 ■water, to found on it a solution of the 

 long-contested question as to the ety- 

 mology of the word " elephant," — a 

 term which, whilst it has passed into 

 almost every dialect of the West, is 

 scarcely to be traced in any language 

 of Asia. The Greek eAe'(/)a?, to which 

 we are immediately indebted for it, 

 did not originally mean the animal, 

 but, as early as the time of Homer, 

 was applied only to its tusks, and si.g- 

 nified ivory. Bdchart has sought 

 for a Semitic origin, and seizing on 

 the Arabic^/, and prefixing the article 

 al, suggests alfil, akin to eAciJ) ; but 

 rejecting this, Bochart himself resorts 

 to the Hebrew eleph, an "ox" — and 

 this conjecture derives a certain degree 

 of countenance from the fact that the 

 Romans, when they obtained their first 

 sight of the elephant in the army of 

 Pyrrhus, in Lucania, called it the 

 Luca bos. But the ai/ros is still unac- 

 counted for : and Pott has sought to 

 remove the difficulty by introducing 

 the Arabic hindi, Indian, thus making 

 elefih hindi., " bos Indicus." The con- 

 version of hindi into a.vTO% is an obsta- 

 cle,but here the example of" tamarind " 

 comes to aid; tamar hindi, the "In- 

 dian date," which in mediasval Greek 

 forms Ta/iapeiTi. A theory of Benary, 



that i\i^a.% might be compounded of 

 the Arabic al, and ibha, a Sanskrit 

 name for the elephant, is exposed to 

 still greater etymological exception. 

 Pictet's solution is, that in the San- 

 skrit epics "the King of Elephants," 

 who has the distinction of carrying the 

 god Indra, is called airavata or aira- 

 vaiia, a modification of airavanta 

 " son of the ocean," which again comes 

 from iravat, "abounding in water." 

 " Nous aurions done ainsi, comme cor- 

 relatif du grec kXi^avja, une anciennc 

 forme, airavanta on Ailavania, affai- 

 blie plus tard en airavata ou airavatta. 

 .... On connalt la predilection de 

 I'elephant pour le voisinage des fleuves, 

 et son amour pour I'eau, dont I'abon- 

 dance est necessaire a son bien-elre." 

 This Sanskrit name, Pictet supposes, 

 may have been carried to the West by 

 the Phoenicians, who were the pur- 

 veyors of ivory from India ; and, from 

 the Greek, the Latins derived clephas. 

 which passed into the modern lan- 

 guages of Italy, Germany, and France. 

 But it is curious that the Spaniards 

 acquired from the Moors their Arabic 

 term for ivory, 7itarfil, and the Portu- 

 guese inarjim ; and that the Scandi- 

 navians, probably from their early ex- 

 peditions to the Mediterranean, adopted 

 Jill as their name for the elephant 

 itself, 3.nAJil-bein for ivory ; in Danish, 



