THE india:n' elephant. 219 



The African elephant is still abundant in Africa generally south 

 of the Sahara, except that near the Cape they have been driven back 

 into the interior by the colonial settlements, extending from the 

 Ox-ange Eiver to the LimpoiDO, and hkewise on the west from Sene- 

 gambia to the mouth of the Niger. On every side their numbers 

 are decreasing with great rapidity, and those that remain are being 

 rapidly crowded toward the heart of Africa. Even there the na- 

 tives make war upon them, as far as they are able, for the sake of 

 :heir ivory. Next to the traffic in slaves, ivory-hunting is the 

 most important business carried on in the interior of the continent. 

 Like the gold-hunters of CaHfornia, those who engage in it pene- 

 trate the most remote and dangerous wildernesses, braving the 

 dangers of death from starvation, fever, and poisoned arrows in their 

 adventurous search for tusks. 



In a brief comparison of the two species, the following are the 

 most striking points of difference : 



The African elephant is undeniably larger than the Indian. Sir 

 Samuel Baker informs us that both males and females of the former 

 averajre about one foot taller than the latter, of which not more than 

 one male in a thousand attains a vertical shoulder height of ten feei 

 The African elephant has a convex forehead, that amounts to a de- 

 cided hump in the middle of the face, the head is peaked at the top, 

 and the ears are of such enormous size that they meet and overlap 

 each other above the shoulders. The Indian variety has a very 

 broad, concave forehead, and the head has a deep, central furrow 

 lengthwise along the tojD, by reason of which the crown is surmounted 

 by two large rounded humps. The ears are not quite half the size 

 of those which literally cover the entire neck and fore-shoulders of 

 the African individual, and the species are easily distinguishable 

 by this point alone. There are various anatomical differences which 

 it is unnecessary to state here. 



The Ceylon elephant differs from that of India proper in so 

 many points as to necessitate the belief that it is a distinct variety. 

 Hundreds of new species have been founded, and acceptably, upon 

 far slighter differences than we find here. In the first place, while 

 nine out of every ten male Indian elephants have tusks, not one 

 out of every fifty Ceylon elephants possesses them, and Sir Samuel 

 Baker goes so far as to assert that they are present in only one ani- 

 mal out of every three hundred. The Ceylon elephant has twenty 

 pairs of ribs and twenty dorsal vertebrae, against nineteen of each 

 in the Indian species, while the latter possesses one more sacral 



