284 THE ELEPHANT. 



have been of little or no use, was probably another 

 of the causes why the elephant was again permitted 

 to range his native haunts in unrestricted liberty. 



It used to be a popular notion that female ele- 

 phants, captured when pregnant, showed the 

 greatest possible aversion to their young when, 

 at an after-period, they came into the world, and 

 not only refused to suckle, but actually ill-treated 

 them when they attempted to lay hold of the teat. 

 It was formerly believed, also, that the male ele- 

 phant, when reduced to a state of captivity, would 

 not propagate his species ; some imagining that 

 this was owing to his possessing the sentiment of 

 modesty in an unusually high degree ; others, that 

 his feelings for the loss of liberty were so acute as to 

 cause him to refuse obedience to the laws of nature, 

 lest he should entail on his progeny a fate similar 

 to his own. There were those, again, who asserted 

 that he lost the power of procreation when in 

 thraldom. 



But all these idle fallacies have long since been 

 exploded. To say nothing of the ancient Romans 

 breeding the elephant when in confinement (as may 

 be safely inferred from the figure of a female in the 

 act of suckling her calf depicted on the walls of 

 Pompeii) there is, in the Transactions of the Philo- 

 sophical Society of London, in the year 1799, a 

 long and elaborate article on the habits of the 

 elephant, which must convince the most sceptical 

 that we have been labouring under a delusion. The 

 evidence, however, of Mr. Corse, who had for a 

 number of years the entire management of several 



