286 MAMMALIA—ELEPHANT. 
burdens of two hundred pounds weight, and place them on their shoulders 
they take in this trunk a great quantity of water, which they throw out around 
them at seven or eight feet distance ; they can carry burdens of more than 
a thousand weight upon their tusks; with their trunk they break branches 
of trees, and with their tusks they root out the trees. One may judge of 
heir strength by their agility, considering at the same time the bulk of their 
body; they walk as fastas a small horse on the trot, and when they run, 
they can keep up with a horse on full gallop, which seldom happens in their 
wild state, except when they are provoked by anger, or frightened. The 
tame elephants travel easily, and without fatigue, fifteen or twenty leagues 
a day; and when they are hurried, they may travel thirty-five or forty 
leagues. They are heard at a great distance, and may be followed very 
near on the track, for the traces which they leave on the ground are not 
equivocal; and on the ground where the steps of their feet are marked they 
are fifteen or eighteen inches in diameter. 
When the elephant is taken care of, he lives a long while even in capti- 
vity. Some authors have written, that he lives four or five hundred years; 
others, two or three hundred; and the most credible, one hundred and 
twenty, thirty, and even one hundred and fifty years. Whatever care, how- 
ever, is taken of the elephant, he does not live long in temperate countries, 
and still less in cold climates. The elephant which the king of Portugal 
sent to Louis XIV., in 1668, and which was then but four years old, died in 
his seventeenth, in January, 1681, and lived only thirteen years in the 
menagerie of Versailles, where he was treated with care and tenderness, 
and fed with profusion. He had every day four pounds of bread, twelve 
pints of wine, two buckets of porridge, with four or five pounds of bread, 
two buckets of rice boiled in water, without reckoning what was given to 
him by visitors ; he had, besides, every day one sheaf of corn to amuse him- 
self; for, after he had eaten the corn ears, he made a kind of whip of straw, 
and used it to drive away the flies; he delighted in breaking the straw in 
small bits, which ke did with great dexterity with his trunk; and, as he 
was led to walk daily, he plucked the grass and eat it. 
The common color of the elephant is ash gray, or blackish. The white 
are extremely scarce; some have been seen at different times in the Indies, 
where also some are found ofa reddish color. 
The elephant has very small eyes, compared with his enormous size, but 
they are sensible and lively; and what distinguishes them from all other 
animals, is their pathetic, sentimental expression. He seems to reflect, to 
think, and to deliberate ; and never acts sill he has examined and observed 
several times, without passion or precipitation, the signs which he is to 
obey. Dogs, the eyes of which have much expression, are animals too 
lively to distinguish their successive sensations; but as the elephant is 
naturally grave and sedate, one may read in his eyes the order and outward 
appearance of his interior affections. 
