TO WHAT AGE DOES AN ELEPHANT LIFE? 125 



Never picket your elephants long in the same spot; stand- 

 ing on their own dung and soil impregnated with their 

 urine will very soon soften or rot the soles of their feet; 

 which, though spongy, ought to be at the same time as hard 

 as ivory. 



If you see an elephant eating earth, stop his grain, he will 

 pass in a few days a quantity of bots, and will then be all right 

 again. 



The period of gestation in an elephant and the age it lives 

 to, have been accepted on very meagre grounds, which are 

 not, in my opinion, conclusive, or even likely. Mr. Sander- 

 son says the average age of an elephant may be reckoned at 

 150 years. Mr. Nuttall, Mr. Sanderson's predecessor for thirty 

 years in the Government Keddahs, held a different opinion. 

 Writing to the late Frank Buckland he said : 



" When the British captured Ceylon, a memorandum was 

 found left by Colonel Robertson, who was in command of the 

 island in 1799, which stated that the elephant attached to the 

 establishment at Matura had served under the Dutch for 

 upwards of 140 years, during the entire period of the occu- 

 pation from the expulsion of the Portuguese in 1656, and 

 found by them in the stables when they took possession of 

 the island." 



Even if this were the case, as one swallow does not make 

 a summer, it does not follow that because there was one 

 Methuselah amongst elephants, all should live to the same 

 period. But as Mr. Nuttall continues : 



" The stories of elephants living to an immense age in India 

 I put no trust in, because with any favourite elephant in 

 former days (when the jemadar had the naming of them) 

 they had special names for these animals, and as their 

 vocabulary of names was but limited, they used to give three 

 or four elephants the same name, as, for instance, Pobun Peary, 

 No. I, Pobun Peary, No. II, and so on. 'Pobun' means 

 * the wind,' and an elephant in the depot possessing swift and 

 easy paces would go by the name of Pobun, and when Pobun 

 I. died, Pobun II. became I., and so on. These names 

 appeared in the office books, while the casualty rolls were kept 

 merely on fly-sheets, and were after a while disposed of as 



