SOUTH AFRICA FIFTY YEARS AGO 79 



the nape of the neck for a seat, and the hemming of the ears, 1 

 when erected, would have half-smothered them. My know- 

 ledge does not allow me to raise any argument on this 

 point ; but might not the same market have been open to 

 the dwellers at Carthage as was afterwards to Mithridates, 

 who, I suppose, drew his supply from India, where they 

 have been broken and made to do man's work from time 

 immemorial? Vide friezes, carvings, pictures, stories, myths 

 innumerable the last running back into obscurity the ele- 

 phant holding in them the position of the ' gin ' in the Arab 

 tales. Half the world has at one time been the habitat of this 

 great pachyderm or its congeners. Siberia, with its fossil ivory 

 mines, and Europe everywhere, are its tombs. Destroyed or 

 driven south by some climatic change, India and Africa are 

 its present homes ; but in Africa the place thereof shall soon 

 know it no more, and to our great-great-grandchildren the old 

 ' tlou ' will be as the mammoth is to us. 



The elephant's age is a disputed point ; but, as no one has 

 quite decided, let me put it down at 200 years, upon these two 

 grounds : ist, that most animals live four or five times as long 

 as they take to attain maturity, and an elephant is certainly 

 not a ' man ' till he is fifty ; 2ndly, that I had charge for the 

 Government of a large take of elephants caught in a ' coopum ' 

 in India. They were sometimes, while being broken, very 

 troublesome, and if they got beyond the control of the men 

 a tame elephant, ' Lachme,' was called in to ' whip ' them. 

 Lachme had been a pagoda elephant sixty years ; we had the 

 record of her capture as a full-grown female. That makes her 

 upwards of a hundred, and she was then, in 1847, quite in her 

 prime, without a sign of old age, and I dare say is very much 



1 I know in the representations on the medals of Faustina and of Septimius 

 Severus the ears are African, though the bodies and heads are Indian ; but 

 these were struck nearly 400 years after Carthaginian times, when the whole 

 known world had been ransacked by the Romans for beasts for their public 

 shows ; and I still think it possible that the Carthaginians the great traders 

 and colonisers of old may have obtained elephants through seme of their 

 colonies, from India. 



