128 ELEPHANTS 



would most willingly present anything more excellent did I 

 possess it." Thenceforward elephants were from time to 

 time exhibited at the Tower, together with lions and other 

 strange beasts acquired by the Crown. 



None of these elephants were, however, " the first who 

 ever burst " into remote Britain after the mammoths had 

 disappeared, and we were separated from Europe by the 

 geological changes which gave us the English Channel 

 La Manche. Though Julius Caesar himself does not 

 mention it, it is definitely stated by a writer on strategy 

 named Polyaenus, a friend of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, 

 but not, I am sorry to say, an authority to whose statements 

 historians attach any serious value that Caesar made use 

 of an elephant armed with iron plates and carrying on its 

 back a tower full of armed men to terrify the ancient 

 Britons when he crossed the Thames an operation which 

 he carried out, I believe, somewhere between Molesey and 

 Staines. 



Elephants are often spoken of as " Ungulates," and classed 

 by naturalists with the hoofed animals (the odd-toed 

 tapirs, rhinoceroses, and horses, and the even-toed pigs, 

 camel, cattle, and deer). But there is not much to say 

 in defence of such an association. The elephants have, 

 as a matter of fact, not got hoofs, and they have five toes 

 on each foot. The five toes of the front foot have each a 

 nail, whilst usually only four toes of the hind foot have 

 nails. A speciality of the elephant is the great circular 

 pad of thick skin overlying fat and fibrous tissue, which 

 forms the sole of the foot and bears the animal's 

 enormous weight. This buffer-like development of the 

 foot existed in some great extinct mammals (the Dinoceras 

 family, of North America), but is altogether different 

 from the support given by a horse's hoof or the paired 

 shoe-like hoofs of great cattle or the three rather elegant 

 hoofed toes of the rhinoceros. 



