1 8 TJie Wild Elephant. 



conjecture any probable utility which it can derive from 

 such appendages. Their absence is unaccompanied by 

 any inconvenience to the individuals in whom they are 

 wanting ; and as regards the few who possess them, the 

 only operations in which I am aware of their tusks being 

 employed in relation to the habits of the animal, is to 

 assist in ripping open the stem of the jaggery palms and 

 young palmyras to extract the farinaceous core ; and in 

 splitting up the juicy shaft of the plantain. Whilst the 

 tuskless elephant crushes the latter under foot, thereby 

 soiling it and wasting its moisture ; the other, by opening 

 it with the point of its tusk, performs the operation with 

 delicacy and apparent ease. 



These, however, are trivial and almost accidental ad- 

 vantages : on the other hand, owing to irregularities in 

 their growth, the tusks are sometimes an impediment to 

 the animal in feeding;' and in more than one instance 

 in the Government studs, tusks which had so grown as 

 to approach and cross one another at the extremities, 

 have had to be relieved by the saw ; the contraction of 

 space between them so impeding the free action of the 

 trunk as to prevent the animal from conveying branches 

 to its mouth. 2 



It is true that in captivity, and after a due course of 



^ Among other eccentric forms, an ' Since the foregoing remarks were 

 elephant was seen in 1844, in the written relative to the undefined use of 

 district of Bintenne, near Friar's-Hood tusks to the elephant, I have seen a 

 Mountain, one of whose tusks was so speculation on the same subject in 

 bent that it took what sailors term a Dr. Holland's "Constitution of the 

 "round turn," a,nd Jihen resumed its Animal Creation, as exj>ressed in 

 curved direction as before. In the striictural aj>petidages : " but the con- 

 Museum of the College of Surgeons, jecture of the author leaves the prob- 

 l-ondon, th^e is a specimen, No 2757, lem scarcely less obscure than before. 

 of a. s/irai tUik. Struck with the mere siipplevienial 



