225 ELEPHANTS IN BRITAIN CHAP. 
in the interstices of its teeth, was the signal for the disappearance 
of their most colossal inhabitant. 
The large number of remains of this and of other extinct 
species of Hlephas in this country gave rise to the supposi- 
tion that they were Elephants brought over by Caesar to aid 
in the subjugation of these islands) The Rev. J. Coleridge 
(father of the poet) poimted out that though Caesar in his 
Commentaries made no mention of any such importation of 
Elephants, a passage in the Stratagems of Polyaenus expressly 
mentions that Cassivelaunus was confronted by the Romans with 
an Elephant clad in a coat of mail, by whose aid the crossing of 
the Thames was effected. At the time that attention was called 
to this (1757) it was not popular to hint at the possibility 
of fossils. So that fact, conveniently historical, served to 
explain away a difficulty. It is remarkable that the Elephant, 
common enough of course in Asiatic monuments, actually occurs 
in English architecture. Mr. Watkins, from whose interesting 
work (Natural History of the Ancients) a good many of the facts 
detailed here are drawn, tells us that the church of Ottery St. 
Mary has an Elephant’s head sculptured on one of its pillars. 
The same ornament appears in Gosberton Church, Lincolnshire. 
Whether this has anything to do with a reminiscence of formerly 
existing Elephants is a hard question to answer. In this figure 
of an Elephant the trunk has a spiral representation, and the 
trunk of an Elephant is believed by some to be intended by the 
common “so-called Pictish ornamentation” in Scotland; this 
spiral alone is to be seen constantly. If it is a reduction of an 
Elephant to its simplest terms, it is highly interesting as an 
almost undoubted survival of remembrance of Elephants. For at 
such a period we cannot use the memories of Crusaders or others 
who may have visited the East to explain the facts. The 
sculptured Elephants’ heads might conceivably be so explained. 
The name Mammoth, thinks Mr. Watkins, may be derivable 
from the Arabic word Behemoth. He quotes a writer, who first 
described the beast in 1694, as using the two words indifferently. 
The Arabs, moreover, were then as they are now great ivory traders; 
and in the ninth and the two succeeding centuries explored 
the confines of Siberia, as they now do the forests of Africa, for 
ivory. The “ Behemoth” of Job “ eateth grass as an ox... . He 
moveth his tail like a cedar” (the Hippopotamus has a much more 
