4 History of Nature. [BOOK VIIL 



with the Water; and so having saluted the Planet, they 

 return again to the Woods, carrying before them their 

 Young Ones that are fatigued. They are thought also to 

 have an Understanding of Religion 1 in others ; for when they 

 are to pass the Seas they will not enter the Ships before they 

 are induced to it by an Oath of their Governors that they 

 shall return again; and they have been seen enfeebled by 

 Sickness (for as Large as they are they are subject to Sick- 

 ness), to lie upon their Backs, throwing up Herbs toward 

 Heaven, as if they had procured the Earth to pray for them. 

 Now for their Docility : they adore the King, they kneel and 

 offer Chaplets of Flowers. The lesser sort, which they call 

 Bastards, serve the Indians to Plough their Ground. 



CHAPTER II. 



When Elephants were first put to Draw. 



THE first time they were known to Draw at Rome was in 

 the Chariot of Pompey the Great, in the African Triumph. 



1 The author in several places speaks of religion in animals : as of 

 monkeys, b. viii. c. 54, and of barn-door poultry, b. x. c. 41. The oryx 

 was judged to be impious, because it had been seen to display signs of dis- 

 regard or contempt to the moon. To understand the ground of this 

 opinion, it is necessary to bear in mind that the religion of the heathens 

 did not include or demand a spiritual attachment, or mental conformity, 

 to the character or commands of the object worshipped, but was merely 

 ritual : the latreia being an official service which was employed to allay 

 the anger of some divinity, which had been raised by some cause equally 

 remote from any feeling of a moral nature with that instituted to obviate 

 it. The real cultus was comprised in this ceremony, and religion was the 

 binding of this cultus, or worship, on those who were subject to it as 

 superstition included the employment of a greater amount of ceremony 

 than the latreia demanded ; and as this was judged to proceed from a 

 greater degree of fear than the cause required, it was always considered 

 as degrading him that manifested it. As the proper idea of religion was 

 supposed to be the binding of the cultus on those only who were the sub- 

 jects of it, it was no great extension of the same principle to suppose that 

 animals might be subject to the same laws as men in these respects, and 

 that they might have recourse to means of a similar kind to obviate 

 similar offences. That the elephant practised religious rites was not the 



