ELEPHANT HUNTING. 133 



In the jungles of the East Indies an elephant must be shot 

 through the brain, and thus killed at the first tire, or he is very apt 

 to get away. Should the ball not touch the brain, the elephant is 

 only stunned for an instant and is almost certain to move off at a 

 high rate of speed. The latest writer on elephant hunting in 

 India * says, in " Thirteen Years Among the Wild Beasts of India," 

 " I have never recovered any elephant that has left the spot with a 

 head shot," and my own experience has been the same. True, even 

 in India an elephant may be shot in the shoulder and partially dis- 

 abled, to be followed up and re-attacked time after time until he 

 fails ; but this practice is dangerous, unsportsmanlike, and unde- 

 serving of success. It is, perhaps, a sui'er way of bagging an ele- 

 phant, but there can be no glory in it, nor even satisfaction, it seems 

 to me. Although, by force of circumstances, I have to shoot all game 

 animals regardless of age, sex, or condition, I yet have pride enough 

 to be above shooting an elephant in the shoulder or anywhere else 

 than in the brain. At the very outset I resolved to bag each of my 

 elephants with a single ball through the brain, in a sportsmanlike 

 manner, or else hire a sportsman to do it for me. 



On the plains of South Africa the famous wild-animal slayer, 

 Gordon Gumming, used to shoot elephants in the shoulder, and 

 then gallop alongside them for miles, loading and firing until the 

 weight of lead would compel the wretched beasts to fall. He re- 

 lates how he once had to fire forty two-ounce balls into a single 

 elephant before bringing him down. In India no such barbaric 

 modes of hunting are practised, nor are they even possible. 



In examining a section of an elephant's skull we find that while 

 the skull is of great size in order to afford an extensive surface for 

 the attachment of the powerful muscles of the trunk and jaws, the 

 brain itself is very small indeed, situated far back, and surrounded 

 by such a huge, irregular mass of bone and flesh, that its exact po- 

 sition in the living animal is very hard for the novice to determine. 

 The skull is really of great thickness, but it is composed of long, 

 narrow cells perpendicular to the surface of the skull, some three 

 to six inches in length, others small, h-regular, and honey-comb 

 like. The skull has really an outer and an inner wall of consider- 

 able thickness, between which lie these bony cells, separated from 

 each other by walls of bone as thin as pasteboard. These cells all 

 communicate with each other, and thi'ough the frontal sinuses with 



* G. P. Sanderson. 



