vD 



8 The Wild Elephant. 



Yet Nature hath given him no knee- to bend : 

 Himself he up-props, on himself rehes ; 

 Still sleeping stands." ^ 



Sir Thomas Browne, while he argues against the 

 delusion, does not fail to record his suspicion, that 

 "although the opinion at present be reasonably well 

 suppressed, yet from the strings of tradition and fruitful 

 recurrence of errour, it was not improbable it might 

 revive in the next generation ;"2 — an anticipation which 

 has proved singularly correct ; for the heralds still con- 

 tinued to explain that the elephant is the emblem of 

 watchfulness, '•'■ nee jacet in sotnno"^ and poets almost of 

 our own times paint the scene when 



" Peaceful, beneath primeval trees, that cast 

 Their ample shade on Niger's yellow stream. 

 Or where the Ganges rolls his sacred waves. 

 Leans the huge elephant." ■* 



It is not difficult to discern whence this antiquated 

 delusion took its origin ; nor is it, as Sir Thomas Browne 

 imagined, to be traced exclusively "to the grosse and 

 cylindricall structure " of the animal's legs. The fact is, 

 that the elephant, returning in the early morning from 

 his nocturnal revels in the reservoirs and watercourses, 

 is accustomed to rub his muddy sides against a tree, and 

 sometimes against a rock if more convenient. Often in 

 my rides at sunrise through the northern forests, the 



' Progress of tJie Soul, K.'D. 1633. 1610 ; wherein he explains that the 



'^ Sir T. Browne, Vulgar Errors, elephant is "so proud of his strength 



A.D. 1646. that he never bows himself to any 



' Randal Home's Academy of Ar- [teeither indeed can lie), and when he 



viory, A.D. 1671. Home only per- is once down he cannot rise up .igain.'" 



petuated the error of Guillim, who (Sec. in. ch. xii. p. 147.) 



wrote his Display of Heraldry in A.D. ■* Thomson's Seasons, a.d. 1728. 



