SOUTH AFRICA FIFTY YEARS AGO 79 
__ the nape of the neck for a seat, and the hemming of the ears,! 
_ _ 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 Aaditat of this 
great pachyderm or its congeners. Siberia, with its fossil ivory 
_ mines, and Europe everywhere, are its tombs. Destroyed or 
_ @riven 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: 1st, 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 
tame elephant, ‘ Lachmé,’ was called in to ‘whip’ them. 
Lachmé 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 
me, without a sign of old age, and I dare say is very much 
¥ I know in the representations on the medals of Faustina and of Septimius 
s the ears are African, though the bodies and heads are Indian; but 
were struck nearly 400 years after Carthaginian times, when the whole 
world had been ransacked by the Romans for beasts for their public 
; and I still think it possible that the Carthaginians—the great traders 
colonisers of old—may have obtained elephants through some of their 
es, from India. 
