1 7 o ANIMALS AT WORK AND PL A Y 



various forms of animal toilet play an important 

 part. It is almost more necessary that the outside 

 of an animal, whether skin or scales, should be free 

 from disease, than that the interior functions should 

 be in perfect order. Nature seems to cure the 

 latter, but not the former. On the contrary, animals 

 when wild constantly die a lingering death from 

 injury to the skin, whether caused, as usually 

 happens in tropical countries, by wounds aggravated 

 by insects, or by cutaneous disease. Hence the pains 

 which they take in making their toilet, and in the 

 use and selection of c cosmetics.' Nearly every 

 tropical animal, including the tiger, bathes either 

 in water or in mud. Perhaps the best-known mud- 

 bathers are the wild boar, the water buffalo, and the 

 elephant. The latter has an immense advantage 

 over all other animals, in the use of its trunk for 

 dressing wounds. It is at once a syringe, a powder- 

 ing-puff, and a hand. Water, mud, and dust are the 

 main ' applications ' used, though it sometimes covers 

 a sun-scorched back with grass or leaves. ' Wounded 

 elephants,' writes Sir Samuel Baker, ' have a marvel- 

 lous power of recovery when in their wild state, 

 although they have no gifts of surgical knowledge, 

 their simple system being confined to plastering their 

 wounds with mud, or blowing dust upon the surface. 

 Dust and mud comprise the entire pharmacopoeia of 



