462 nisroRV of 



mankind. The elephant gathers flowers with great pleasure and 

 attention ; it picks them up one by one, unites them into a nose- 

 gay, and seems charmed with the perfume. The orange-flower 

 seems to be particularly grateful, both to its sense of taste and 

 smelling ; it strips the tree of all its verdure, and eats every 

 part of it, even to the branches themselves. It seeks in the 

 meadows the most odoriferous plants to feed upon ; and in the 

 woods it prefers the cocoa, the banana, the palm, and the sago 

 tree, to all others. As the shoots of these are tender, and filled 

 with pith, it eats not only the leaves and the frmts, but even 

 the branches, the trunk, and the whole plant to the very roots. 



But it is in the sense of touching that this animal excels 

 all others of the brute creation, and perhaps even man himself. 

 The organ of this sense lies wholly in the trunk, which is an in- 

 strument peculiar to this animal, and that serves it for all the 

 purposes of a hand. The trunk is, properly speaking, only the 

 snout lengthened out to a great extent, hollow like a pipe, and 

 ending in two openings or nostrils like those of a hog. An 

 elej)hant of fourteen feet high has the trunk about eight feet 

 long, and five feet and a half in circumference at the mouth 

 where it is thickest. It is hollow along, but with a partition 

 running from one end of it to the other ; so that though out- 

 wardly it appears like a single pipe, it is inwardly divided into 

 two. This fleshy tube is composed of nerves and muscles, 

 covered with a proper skin of a blackish colour, like that of the 

 rest of the body. It is capable of being moved in every direc- 

 tion, of being lengthened and shortened, of being bent and 

 *traightened ; so pliant as to embrace any body it is applied to, 

 and yet so strong that nothing can be torn from the gripe. To 

 aid *.he force of this grasp, there are several little eminences, 

 like a caterpillar's feet, on the underside of this instrument, which 

 without doubt contribute to the sensibility of the touch, as well 

 as to the firmness of the hold. Through this trunk the animal 

 breathes, drinks, and smells, as through a tube ; and at the very 

 point of it, just above the nostrils, there is an extension of the 

 skin, about five inches long, in the form of a finger, and which 

 in fact answers all the purposes of one ; for with the rest of the 

 extremity of the trunk, it is capable of assuming difl'erent forms 

 at will, and consequently of being adapted to the minutest ob- 

 jects. By means of this, the elephant can take a pin from tht 



