62 STUDIES IN LIFE AND SENSE. 



IV. 



ELEPHANTS. 



THE interest which attaches to the modern representatives of the 

 mammoth host is by no means limited to the zoological world, but 

 extends throughout all classes of society, who find something to 

 wonder at even in the huge proportions and ungainly ways of the 

 elephant family. A remarkably limited family circle is that which 

 includes the elephants as its typical representatives. The past history 

 of the race, like that of not a few other groups of animals and plants, 

 is exactly the converse of its present-day phases, as regards numerical 

 strength at least. As the existing pearly nautilus is the sole survivor 

 of the immense hordes of four-gilled and shelled cuttlefishes which 

 swarmed in the primitive seas and oceans of our earth ; or as the few 

 living " lampshells," or Brachiopods, represent in themselves the 

 fulness of a life that crowded the Silurian seas, so the two existing 

 species of elephants with which we are familiar to-day, stand forth 

 among quadrupeds as the representatives of a comparatively plentiful 

 past population of these mammalian giants. The causes which have 

 depopulated the earth of its elephantine tenants may be alluded to 

 hereafter ; but it is evident that neither size nor strength avails 

 against the operation of those physical environments which so power- 

 fully affect the ways and destinies of man and monad alike. One 

 highly important feature of elephant organisation may, however, be 

 noted even in these preliminary details respecting the modern scarcity 

 of elephantine species, namely, that the slow increase of the race, 

 and, as compared with other animals at least, the resulting paucity of 

 numbers, must have had their own share as conditions affecting the 

 existence of these huge animals. The elephants are, of all known 

 animals, the slowest to increase in numbers. At the earliest, the 

 female elephant does not become a parent until the age of thirty 

 years, and only six young are capable of being produced during the 

 parental period, which appears to cease at ninety years of age ; the 

 average duration of elephant life being presumed to be about a 

 hundred years. But it is most interesting, as well as important in 

 view of any speculation on the increase of species and on the ques- 

 tion of competition amongst the races of animal life, to reflect that, 

 given favourable conditions of existence, such as a sufficiency of food, 

 a freedom from disease and from the attack of enemies and the 

 elephant race, slow of increase as it is, would come in a few thousand 



