WHEN ELEPHANTS BROUGHT TO EUROPE 127 



Germany. It retained a complete coat of coarse hair 

 throughout life. The young of our surviving elephants 

 only exhibit transitorily the family tendency. 



The last mammoth probably disappeared from the area 

 which is now Great Britain about 150,000 years ago. It 

 might be supposed that no elephant was seen in England 

 again until the creation of " menageries " and " zoological 

 Gardens " within the last two or three hundred years. 

 This, however, is by no means the case. The Italians in 

 the middle ages, and through them the French and the 

 rulers of Central Europe, kept menageries, and received as 

 presents, or in connection with their trade with the East 

 and their relations with Eastern rulers, frequent specimens 

 of strange beasts from distant lands. Our King Henry I, 

 had a menagerie at Woodstock, where he kept a porcu- 

 pine, lions, leopards, and a camel ! The Emperor 

 Charlemagne received in 803 A.D. from Haroun al 

 Raschid, the Caliph of Bagdad, an elephant named 

 Abulabaz. It was brought to Aix-la-Chapelle by Isaac the 

 Jew, and died suddenly in 8 1 o. Some four and a half 

 centuries later (in 1257), Louis IX, of France, returning 

 from the Holy Land, sent as a special and magnificent 

 present to Henry III, King of England (according to the 

 chronicle of Matthew Paris), an elephant which was ex- 

 hibited at the Tower of London. It was supposed by the 

 chronicler to be the first ever brought to England, and 

 indeed the first to be taken beyond Italy, for he did not 

 know of Charlemagne's specimen. In 1591 King Henry 

 IV of France, wishing to be very polite to Queen 

 Elizabeth of England, and apparently rather troubled by 

 the expense of keeping the beast himself, sent to her, 

 having heard that she would like to have it, an elephant 

 which had been brought from the " Indies " and landed at 

 Dieppe. He declared it to be the first which had ever 

 come into France, but presented it to Her Majesty " as I 



