180 CASSELL'S POPULAR NATURAL HISTORY. 



Matiliew Piiris relates that, about the year 1255, an elephant was sent over to England as a grand 

 present IV" ni tin- Kin-,' of France to Henry III. ; and states that it was believed to be the first and 

 only elephant ever seen in Kiijjliind, or even on- this side the Alps; and that, consequently, the people 

 fU-ke.l in laix'e iiuiiilx-rs to behold so great a novelty on its arrival. Among, the Close Rolls, one of 

 about this date is extant, in which the Sheriff of Kent is ordered to proceed to Dover in person to 

 arrange in what manner the king's elephant might be most conveniently brought over, and to provide 

 a ship, and other things necessary to convey it; and directing that, if the king's mariners judged it 

 practicable, it should be brought to London by water. Another order was shortly after issued to the 

 sheriffs of London, commanding them to cause to be built, without delay, in the Tower of London, a 

 house, forty feet in length and twenty in breadth, for the king's elephant ; and directing that it should 

 be so strongly constructed that, whenever there should be need, it might be adapted to and used for 

 other purposes. Next year, on the llth of October, the king, in like manner, commanded the sheriff 

 " to find for the said elephant and his keeper such necessaries as should be reasonable and needful." 



Shakespeare, in " Troilus and Cressida," compares the slowness of Ajax to that of the elephant. 

 There is reason to believe that the elephant had been adopted in his time as the sign of a public 

 inn. Antonio, in " Twelfth Night," tells Sebastian : 



" In the south suburbs, at the ' Elephant' 

 Is best to lodge: I will bespeak our diet, 

 While you beguile your time." 



This animal was occasionally beheld, with great astonishment, by the visitors of our travelling 

 menageries, in former days, as it was subsequently at Exeter Change, in the collections of Polito and 

 Cross ; but, latterly, our Zoological Gardens have rendered it especially familiar. 



The enormous magnitude of the skull of the elephant is the first thing that strikes the eye, sur- 

 veying the skeleton, conjoined with the bold elevation of the forehead; though the brain is by 110 

 means conformable to the promise which the skull holds out. Its magnitude, indeed, is owing to 

 causes of a very different nature from the development of the cerebral mass : it is, in fact, occasioned 

 by the distance to which the two tables of the bones are parted asunder, the intermediate space being 

 filled up by a sort of irregular honeycomb structure. This peculiarity especially prevails on the 

 top of the head, and over the forehead ; hence its elevation, and the almost perpendicular bearing 

 of its outline. In destroying the celebrated elephant " Chuny," in Exeter Change, whose skeleton 

 graces the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, a difficulty arose from the balls lodging in the 

 space between the outer and inner tables of the skull, filled up with these cellular intersections, without 

 their piercing the brain or injuring any organ ofr vital importance. 



In the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons is also the skull of a fine elephant, which became 

 long since a target for the hunter's rifle. There are three bullet wounds all healed in the face, and 

 the bullets are still, doubtless, lodged in the reticular diplije between the tables of the skull. One of 

 these wounds is in the forehead, the hunter having evidently aimed at the point where the nasal aper- 

 ture is situated ; and, had the ball entered there, it would most probably have brought the animal 

 down, as it would have had only to encounter the comparatively thin wall of bone at the back of the 

 chamber. A little to the left of this is the second hole. The third ball passed through the upper part of 

 the great temporal muscle of the right side, and entered far into the osseous net- work. Admirably has 

 the curative process been completed ; for, if the finger be introduced, a smooth-walled, circular, bony 

 nin:il will be felt as far as can be reached. It is well, therefore, to remember that the chamber of the 

 brain, which last forms sA th part of the elephant's body, is but of comparatively small extent, while 

 there is ample room for such a centre of the nervous system as the animal requires. 



The head of the elephant is also ponderous from its enormous tusks, which often attain the length 

 of six fret, and sometimes even more. They are implanted in alveoli, or sockets, in the upper jaw ; 

 and, if we examine tliein, we shall find them occupying the whole anterior portion of the face. The 

 proportion! necessary for these alveoli, or sockets of the tusks, render the upper jaw so high, and so 

 much shorten the bones of the nose, that the nostrils are found in the skeleton towards the upper part 

 <>f the lace; but, in the living animal, they are prolonged into the well-known proboscis, or trunk. 

 ''I'lie largest, tusk.-," says a traveller, "I ever saw in Bengal, did not weigh more than seventy pounds." 

 J'-ut tin-re an- .some in the India House, and other places, that weigh more than one-hundred and fifty 



