CHAPTER XL 



THE ELEPHANT, TAPIR, HYRAX, AND RHINOCEROS. 



THE ELEPHANT. 



A 



BY F. C. SELOUS. 



T once the mightiest and most majestic of all terrestrial 

 mammals, the elephant appeals to the imagination 

 more forcibly than any other living animal, not only 

 on account of its great sagacity and the strangeness and 

 singularity of its outward appearance, but also because it is such 

 an obvious link between the world of to-day and the dim and 

 distant past of Pleiocene and Miocene times. 



There are two existing species of elephant, the AFRICAN and 

 the ASIATIC, the latter, from the structure of its molar teeth and 

 the shape of its skull, appearing to be very nearly related to the 

 MAMMOTH, which lived upon the earth in comparatively recent 

 times geologically speaking and was undoubtedly contem- 

 porary with man in Europe during the Stone Age. 



There are very considerable differences both in the external 

 appearance and also in the habits of the two existing forms of 

 elephant. In the African species the forehead is more convex 

 and the eye relatively larger than in its Asiatic cousin ; and 

 whilst the ears of the latter are only of moderate size, those of 

 the former are so large that they at once arrest the attention, 

 and are one of that animal's most remarkable external character- 

 istics. Both sexes of the African species, with few exceptions, 

 carry well-developed tusks, but in the Asiatic form the tusks of 

 the females are so small as scarcely to protrude beyond the jaws. 

 In Asia, too, tuskless bull elephants are common, whilst males 

 of the African species without tusks are extremely rare. The 

 latter species has but three nails on the hind foot, the Asiatic 

 elephant four. In the African species the middle of the back is 

 hollowed, the shoulder being the highest point, whilst in the Asiatic 



elephant the back is arched, and the top of the shoulder lower than the highest part of the back. 

 The extremity of the proboscis is also different in the two species, the African elephant being 

 furnished with two nearly equal-sized prolongations, the one on the front, the other on the hinder 

 margin, with which small objects can be grasped as with the finger and thumb of the human 

 hand, whilst in the Asiatic species the finger-like process on the upper margin of the end of the 

 trunk is considerably longer than that on the under-side. In external appearance the skin of the 

 African elephant is darker in colour and rougher in texture than that of the Asiatic form. The 

 molar teeth of the former animal are, too, of much coarser construction, with fewer and larger 

 plates and thicker enamel than in the latter, which would naturally lead one to suppose that the 



172 



A FINE TUSKER 



The male Indian elephant has smaller tusks 

 than the African species 



