238 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



The carvings of our palaeolithic forefathers, etched on 

 bone by cavern dwellers, from whom we are sundered by 

 ages which stretch into an immemorial past, show that in 

 their lives the hairy elephant of the north played the same 

 part that his remote collateral descendant now plays in the 

 lives of the savages who dwell under a vertical sun beside 

 the tepid waters of the Nile and the Congo. 



In the first dawn of history, the sculptured records of 

 the kings of Egypt, Babylon, and Nineveh show the immense 

 importance which attached in the eyes of the mightiest 

 monarchs of the then world to the chase and the trophies 

 of this great strange beast. The ancient civilization of In- 

 dia boasts as one of its achievements the taming of the ele- 

 phant; and in the ancient lore of that civilization the 

 elephant plays a distinguished part. 



The elephant is unique among the beasts of great bulk 

 in the fact that his growth in size has been accompanied by 

 growth in brain power. With other beasts growth in bulk 

 of body has not been accompanied by similar growth of 

 mind. Indeed sometimes there seems to have been mental 

 retrogression. The rhinoceros, in several different forms, 

 is found in the same regions as the elephant, and in one of 

 its forms it is in point of size second only to the elephant 

 among terrestrial animals. Seemingly the ancestors of the 

 two creatures, in that period, separated from us by uncounted 

 hundreds of thousands of years, which we may conven- 

 iently designate as late miocene or early pliocene, were sub- 

 stantially equal in brain development. But in one case 

 increase in bulk seems to have induced lethargy and atrophy 

 of brain power, while in the other case brain and body have 

 both grown. At any rate the elephant is now one of the 



