Docility. 



159 



provoke chastisement by their viciousness, are ahvays 

 slower in being trained, and are rarely to be trusted in 

 after-life. ^ 



But whatever may be its natural gentleness and 

 docility, the temper of an elephant is seldom to be im- 

 plicitly relied on in a state of captivity and coercion. 

 The most amenable are subject to occasional fits of 

 stubbornness ; and even after years of submission, irri- 

 tability and resentment will sometimes unaccountably 

 manifest themselves. It may be that the restraints and 

 severer discipline of training have not been entirely for- 

 gotten ; or that incidents which in ordinary health would 

 be productive of no demonstration whatever, may lead, 

 in moments of temporary illness, to fretfulness and anger. 



' The natives of Ceylon profess that 

 the high-caste elephants, such as are 

 allotted to the temples, are of all others 

 the most difficult to tame, and M. 

 Bles, the Dutch correspondent of BuF- 

 FON, mentions a caste of elephants 

 which he had heard of, as being pecu- 

 liar to the Kandyan kingdom, that 

 were not higher than a heifer (genisse), 

 covered with hair, and insusceptible of 

 being tamed. (Buffon, Siipp. vol. vi. 

 p. 29.) Bishop He-jer, in the account 

 of his journey from Bareilly towards 

 the Himalayas, describes the Raja 

 Gourman Sing, " mounted on a little 

 female elephant, hardly bigger than a 

 Durham ox, and almost as shaggy as a 

 poodle." (Joiirii. ch. xvii.) It will be 

 remembered that the mammoth dis- 

 covered in 1803 embedded in icy soil 

 in Siberia, was covered with a coat of 

 long hair, with a sort of wool at the 

 roots. Hence there arose the question 

 whether that northern region had been 

 formerly inhabited by a race of ele- 



phants, so fortified by nature against 

 cold ; or whether the individual dis- 

 covered had been borne thither by cur- 

 rents from some more temperate lati- 

 tudes. To the latter theory the presence 

 of hair seemed a fatal objection ; but so 

 far as my own observation goes, I 

 believe the elephants are more or less 

 provided with hair. In some it is more 

 developed than in others, and it is par- 

 ticularly observable in the young, which 

 when captured are frequently covered 

 with a woolly fleece, especially about 

 the head and shoulders. In the older 

 individuals in Ceylon, this is less ap- 

 parent ; and in captivity the hair ap- 

 pears to be altogether removed by the 

 custom of the mahouts to rub their 

 skin daily with oil and a rough lump of 

 burned clay. See a paper on the sub- 

 ject, Asiat. yoiirn. N. S. vol. xiv. p. 

 182, by Mr. G. Fairholme. Fossil 

 remains of elephants of extremely small 

 dimensions have, it is said, been dis- 

 covered in the island of Malta. 



