126 WILD SPORTS OF BURMA AND ASSAM 



waste-paper, and therefore no check was possible to the true 

 identification of an elephant, and as no trace could be found 

 except in the office books, which simply showed the same 

 names of elephants running on continually year after year, 

 it appeared as if the elephants reached an extraordinary age. 

 But all this has now been altered, and the books better kept. 

 I consider an elephant to be at its prime about thirty-five or , 

 forty, and capable of working up to seventy or eighty years of 

 age. An elephant's life may extend rather longer than a 

 human being's, but not by much ; but I do not believe in 

 animals (except a very occasional one) living up to 1 50 years. 

 There are mahouts whose fathers, grandfathers, and great- 

 great-great-grandfathers were all mahouts, and my opinion is 

 founded on theirs, supplemented by my own observations of 

 the past thirty years." 



One of the reasons given for believing that an elephant's 

 age extends to 150 years is that the gestation takes from 

 twenty to twenty-four months. When I pointed out that 

 although the mare took eleven months, and the human race 

 only nine months in gestation, and that there could be no 

 comparison in the ages attained by man and horse respectively, 

 Mr. Cameron says this comparison is inadmissible, because 

 cattle and mankind respectively belong to different natural 

 orders. Cattle are born in a condition to take care of them- 

 selves, while mankind are born helpless, like naked birds in a 

 nest, and pass, so to speak, through a period of extra-uterine 

 gestation ; which, if we are to compare them with cattle, must 

 be added to the intra-uterine period. 



If so, add a year or a year and a half, by which time a 

 child is about as capable of taking care of itself as a calf or 

 a colt at birth, and we should get a far longer period of 

 gestation for man than even the elephant, and if so, why 

 should not men's days be 150 years instead of three-score 

 years and ten? but I am not learned enough to argue on such 

 subjects. About 1890, when I was at Bangalore, an officer 

 there showed me some photos of a male elephant in coitu 

 with a female. He had served several, and several photos 

 had been taken. This is a most unusual occurrence, and as 

 the elephants belonged to the Government stud, the commis- 



