fj6 Human Physiology. 



their trunks, which they put to his ears as if talking to him 

 through whispering tubes. He submits, accepts a driver, and 

 yields a ready and loyal obedience. 



Elephants are employed in ploughing, clearing land, piling 

 timber, which they do with great regularity, loading and unload- 

 ing ships, drawing artillery, hunting and war, and they performed 

 important parts in the earliest wars of which we read in history. 

 Though not more ingenious than ants or beetles, their intel- 

 lectual operations perhaps surprise us more, because more like 

 our own. An elephant unloading a ship takes a cask to the 

 shore, rolls it up the beach with his head and trunk, then holds 

 it with his leg while he reaches out his trunk for a stone to prop 

 it with. The first of a train of elephants, carrying an Indian 

 potentate, found on a narrow causeway some sick people who 

 had been brought out of a hospital to lie in the sun. He 

 stopped, but was cruelly urged forward, when with his trunk 

 he carefully removed the poor invalids out of danger. When 

 elephants were drawing an artillery train of the British army in 

 India, a soldier stumbled and fell, so that one of the hinder 

 wheels of a gun carriage was about to crush him. The next 

 elephant instantly seized the wheel with his trunk and raised it, 

 so that it passed safely over the man, whom he then helped to 

 his feet. A female elephant escaped from her keeper, and 

 joined a wild herd. The man was severely punished, but some 

 years later was employed to hunt elephants. He recognised 

 the one he had lost, and went to her alone. She joyfully 

 welcomed him, knelt down, helped him to mount, and assisted 

 in capturing and taming two young ones she had given birth 

 to since she became a fugitive. 



Dogs reason nearly as well as elephants, and are not less 

 affectionate and faithful; and all domestic animals have the 

 brains and physique, the mental and moral characters, which 

 fit them for their evident destiny as the companions and 

 servants of man. The law of their life, as of ours, and every 



