184 IVORY AND THE ELEPHANT 



ary with its trunk and whirled him aloft, but the soldier 

 did not lose his presence of mind, and drawing his short, 

 sharp sword, struck at the encircling trunk, inflicting such a 

 painful wound that the animal released him and fled, trum- 

 peting wildly.* 



The historic city of Catania in Sicily counts as one of its 

 greatest adornments La Fontana dell' Elefante,t a beautiful 

 sculptural work placed in the plaza before the cathedral. 

 The splendidly modelled figure of an elephant supports a 

 lofty shaft, and the design suggests the elephant-borne 

 obelisk erected in Papal Rome in the sixteenth century. 

 The proximity of Sicily to ancient Carthage, and the Phoeni- 

 cian settlements on the island in the era of Carthaginian 

 prosperity, made the elephant a familiar though dreaded 

 figure for the Sicilian of ancient times, and the Catanian 

 sculpture may be regarded as a distant echo of Grseco- 

 Roman tradition. 



The rare and interesting old treatise "De Proprietatibus 

 Rerum," by the English ecclesiastic, Bartolomseus Anglicus, 

 who flourished toward the middle of the thirteenth century 

 and was for some years a professor of theology in the famous 

 University of Paris, the great resort of the scholars of this 

 period, has a chapter on the elephant, in which the learned 

 author has gathered together all the data available from the 

 works of still older writers. From them he repeats the 

 traditional view as to the great age to which some of these 

 animals may attain, putting this at three centuries. Their 

 use in war by the Medes and Persians is touched upon, and 

 the custom of placing wooden turrets on their backs in which 

 were stationed men-at-arms. The queer fancy that the 

 elephant had a particular dread of the mouse is also chroni- 



*Csesaris, op. cit., 83, 84, 86, 



fThe great Spanish Encyclopedia now being published in Barcelona figures this interest- 

 ing elephant monument twice, once in the article elefante in Vol. XIX, p. 702, and again 

 in the article Catania, Vol. XII, p. 479. 



