FOSSIL ELEPHANTS. 287 



biltong, and they also eat it with their corn. The fat of the Elephant lies in extensive layers and 

 sheets in his inside, and the quantity which is obtained from a full-grown bull, in high condition, 

 is very great. Before it can be obtained, the greater part of the intestines must be removed! 

 To accomplish this, several men eventually enter the immense cavity of his inside, where they 

 continue mining away with their assegais, and handing the fat to their comrades outside until all 

 is bare. While this is transpiring with the sides and intestines, other parties are equally active in 

 removing the skin and flesh from the remaining parts of the carcass. 



" The natives have a horrid practice on these occasions of besmearing their bodies, from the crown 

 of the head to the sole of the foot, with the black and clotted gore ; and in this anointing they assist 

 one another, each man taking up the fill of both his hands, and spreading it over the back and shoulders 

 of his friend. Throughout the entire proceeding, an incessant and deafening clamour of many voices 

 and confused sounds is maintained, and violent jostling and wrestling are practised by every man, 

 elbowing the breasts and faces of his fellows, all slippery with gore, as he endeavours to force his 

 way to the flesh through the dense intervening ranks, while the sharp and ready assegai gleams 

 in every hand. The angry voices and gory appearances of these naked savages, combined with their 

 excited and frantic gestures and glistening arms, presented an effect so wild and striking that, when 

 I first beheld the scene, I contemplated it in the momentary expectation of beholding one-half of the 

 gathering turn their weapons against the other. 



"The trunk and feet of the Elephant are considered a great delicacy, and are baked in 

 holes in the earth, which have been heated by fires burnt in them. The flesh of the Elephant is 

 then cut into strips, varying from six to twenty feet, and about two inches in breadth and thickness. 

 It is then placed on poles, and allowed to dry in the sun for two or three days, after which it is 

 packed into bundles, each man carrying off his share to his wife and family." 



FOSSIL ELEPHANTS AND THEIR ALLIES. 



The Proboscidea, represented, as we have already seen, by two species only among living animals, 

 both of which are met with in and near the tropical regions of the Old World, in the fossil state are 

 met with over nearly the whole of the Old World, and of the New ; and are divided into three 

 genera Elephas, Mastodon, and Dinotherium. 



The teeth and bones of these creatures found in Europe were assigned in the sixteenth, seventeenth, 

 and eighteenth centuries to giants, and many are the stories which were commonly reported about them 

 as, for example, that of the giant of Dauphine, in the reign of Louis XIV. His remains were 

 discovered by a surgeon, who stated that they were enclosed in an enormous sepulchre covered with 

 a stone slab, bearing the inscription Teutobochus rex; and that in the vicinity there were also found 

 coins or medals, all of which showed the remains to be those of a giant king of the Cimbri, who fought 

 against Marius. However, the original owner of these bones, though not of the coins, was proved to 

 have been an Elephant. 



The story of Teutobochus is even excelled by that of another giant, called the giant of Lucerne, 

 whose remains when dug up were examined by a celebrated Professor of Basle, who described them as 

 of human origin, and was skilful enough to put them together so as to resemble a giant no less than 

 twenty-six feet high. For some time the deluded people of Lucerne paid homage to this Elephantine 

 prodigy, until the scales were removed from their eyes by Blumenbach, who pronounced to their 

 astonished senses that the giant, as it lay in state at the Jesuits' College, was but the skeleton of an 

 Elephant. 



The Tertiary or third great period into which the geologists divide the life-history of the earth 

 consists of the following divisions : Eocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene, Prehistoric, and Historic, 

 and it is in the Pliocene stage that the Elephant first appears in Europe and America. 



The large, straight-tusked Elephant (E. meridionalis), with large grinders composed of thick and 

 coarse plates, is found ranged over the whole of France, Italy, Britain, and Germany in those times, 

 in company with another narrow-toothed species, also with straight tusks, described by Dr. Falconer 

 under the name of Elephas antiquus. 



By far the best known and most important of these huge creatures is the far-famed MAMMOTH 



