CLASS I. MAMMALIA: ORDER 11. PACHYDERM AT A. 627 



AN EAST INDIAN MONARCH, MOUNTED ON AN ELEPHANT. 



and has long been trained to swell the pomp of pageants, and add to the terrors of war, as well 

 as to perform the useful offices of a beast of burden and draught, and the dreadful one of execut- 

 ing the sentence of death on criminals. »It has been made the companion of the sports of the 

 Orientalist in the great hunting parties, and from an early period has been made to minister to 

 the wanton and cruel pleasures of Eastern princes, by being stimulated to combat not only with 

 other elephants but with various wild animals, It is curious that the elephant is not mentioned 

 in the Bible, though ivory is spoken of in the commerce carried on by Hiram and Solomon. 

 From about 270 B. C. they were known at Rome, and were introduced into the triumphal pro- 

 cessions. In 122 B. C. they were used in the war against the Allobroges, in Gaul. Alexander 

 took a large number in his victories over the Indian King Porus. Hannibal marched into 

 Italy with numbers of these animals, and the tusks found imbedded in the soil along the banks 

 of the Arno, and now shown in the museum at Florence, are popularly considered to have be- 

 longed to those which perished in the passage across the territory, which was then a deep, tangled 

 morass, though more probably they are the remains of proboscidiens of remote geological ages. 

 The Ptolemies of Egypt, as well as the Seleucides of Syria, had numerous war-elephants. Haroun- 

 al-Raschid, among the presents dispatched to Charlemagne, sent an elephant, which was em- 

 barked at Pisa A. D. 801, and was conveyed to Aix la Chapelle. 



In more modern times the Asiatic Elephant has become common in the menageries of Europe 

 and America, and is always the great attraction alike of the wise and the simple, the philosopher 

 and the child. Its performances in a tank or reservoir of water appropriated to its use — now 

 rolling and wallowing in it like a huge puncheon ; now squirting the water into the air from the 

 trunk as from the pipe of a fire-engine, and now sinking to the bottom, the whole enormous mass 

 becoming invisible, the top of the trunk only being above water so that the animal may breathe, 

 as is done by a man in a diving-bell — are all exceedingly curious and wonderful. The use of the 

 trunk in receiving presents of cake, fruit, straw, or hay, and then thrusting them into the mouth, 

 and also in picking up small substances, even pieces of money, from the floor, and all this being 

 done with a facility, neatness, and dexterity equal to that of the human hand, excites just and end- 

 less admiration. The look of the monster all this time — blending a curious gravity of the'hill-like 

 head with the shrewdness of intelligent, inquisitive little eyes — excites a strange,. wondering curi- 

 osity, perhaps even a kind of sympathy, sometimes amounting to fascination. In India the ele- 

 phant is a familiar beast; in ancient times it went to war with towers filled with soldiers on its 

 back; it now carries traveling parties in a similar manner. Kings and princes ride upon it in 



