OF WILD ANIMALS 103 



phants has bred just the reverse of contempt. Both Thuman 

 and Richards are quite sure that elephants are the wisest of all 

 wild animals. 



Despite the very great amount of trouble made for Keeper 

 Thuman by Gunda, the Indian, and Kartoum, the African, 

 Thuman grows enthusiastic over the shrewdness of their 

 "cussedness." He is particularly impressed by their skill in 

 opening chain shackles, and unfastening the catches and locks 

 of doors and gates. And really, Kartoum's ingenuity in finding 

 out how to open latches and bolts is almost inexhaustible, as 

 well as marvelous. 



Keeper Richards declares that our late African pygmy 

 elephant, Congo, was the wisest animal he ever has known. I 

 have elsewhere referred to his ability in shutting his outside 

 door. Richards taught him to accept coins from visitors, 

 deposit them in a box, then pull a cord to ring a bell, one pull for 

 each coin represented. The keeper devised four different 

 systems of intimate signals by which he could tell Congo to 

 stop at the right point, and all these were so slight that no one 

 ever detected them. One was by a voice-given cue, another by 

 a hand motion, and a third was by an inclination of the body. 



Keeper Richards relates that Congo would go out in his 

 yard, collect a trunkful of peanuts from visitors, bring them 

 inside and secretly cache them in a corner behind his feed box. 

 Then he would go out for more graft peanuts, bring them in, 

 hide them and proceed to eat the first lot. There are millions 

 of men who do not know what it is to conserve something that 

 can be eaten. 



In this discussion of the intellectual powers and moral 

 qualities of the elephant I will confine myself to my own obser- 

 vations on Elephas indicus, except where otherwise stated. 

 A point to which we ask special attention is that in endeavoring 

 to estimate the mental capacity of the elephant, we will base 

 no general conclusions upon any particularly intelligent indi- 

 vidual, as all mankind is tempted to do in discussions of the 



