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for wet soils, and for countries with periodical rains: in the mud it slips, 

 flounders, falls, and lacerating the ligaments of the hip-joint, never rises. 

 It is perhaps the only quadruped that cannot swim. In a civilized 

 country, with good roads, it would not be maintained at all, and it must be 

 pronounced to be the beast of burden of the barbarian only. So delicate 

 is its constitution that in the AfFghan wars it has been estimated that 

 50,000 of them perished. 



The services of the elephant are, at the utmost, limited geographi- 

 cally to some thirty degrees from the equator, and are indeed unknown, 

 except in India and the countries between it and China. Even in 

 India the cold is so little congenial to it that it is only by degrees that 

 it can be moved northwards with safety. Although preferring the plain 

 the elephant climbs hills and precipices with a success little to be looked 

 for from its huge bulk and unwieldy form. 



Yet, although the native of a warm climate, Hannibal succeeded 

 in taking a number across the Alps, a fact which may lead us to 

 suspect that his passage was an enterprise less arduous than is 

 generally imagined. Of the number of thirty-seven which he 

 brought into Italy, one only, however, survived the first battle, for 

 even in the plain a heavy fall of snow had taken place which 

 destroyed them. But the elephant, although a floundering and awk- 

 ward swimmer, is a bold one, and swims across the Ganges and the 

 Jumna without difficulty. One is therefore surprised to find the diffi- 

 culty which Hannibal encountered in transporting them over so 

 comparatively small a stream as the Rhone. The elephants, however, 

 were African, a distinct species from the Asiatic, and the natives of 

 a higher latitude and a drier country than the intertropical parts of 

 India and its neighbourhood, the country of the Asiatic elephant ; and 

 this may possibly account for their antipathy to the water, and their 

 capacity to sustain a degree of cold which enabled them to be taken 

 across the Alps — implying a cold under which the elephants of Chitta- 

 gong, Burma, Siam, and Ceylon would have quickly perished. 



The elephant, naturally a timid and cautious animal, never could 

 have been of much service in war : had it possessed courage equal to 

 its bulk and strength, it would, of course, have trodden down whole 

 battalions. But it is formidable only to the eye, while it is itself a 

 huge target to be shot at. To ride it for any distance is, at least, 

 a very severe exercise, for, although it has no other pace than a walk, 

 the jolting of that walk is equal to that of a carriage without springs 

 on what the Americans call " a corduroy road." I have never heard 



