ELEPHANTS, HISTORICAL 191 



animals in interior Africa. The suggestion has been made 

 by some, without however much proof, that elephants may 

 be subject to some particular disease that carries off many 

 of them from time to time. In any case, when we consider 

 that under favourable conditions an age of one hundred years 

 is not believed to be at all unusual, this limit being not 

 seldom exceeded, even though the total offspring of a cow 

 elephant may not number more than four or five in a life- 

 time, the a priovi likelihood of larger numbers seems ap- 

 parent. An argument in favour of some degenerating dis- 

 ease has been found in the fact that the female Asiatic 

 elephants are almost all tuskless, and that the males them- 

 selves rarely show tusks surpassing 35 to 50 pounds in 

 weight. 



The National Zoological Park in Washington, D. C, 

 owns, as a gift from the Adam Forepaugh show, an ele- 

 phant of great size though not of exceptional height. This 

 is a male of the Indian species and has been named "Dunk." 

 The height taken at the shoulder is 8 ft. 8 in., but the 

 weight has been estimated at 11,000 pounds. It is supposed 

 to be about fifty years old. As is the case with many 

 Indian elephants "Dunk" is tuskless. 



As to the longevity of the elephant we have the state- 

 ment in a memorandum made by Colonel Robertson, who 

 commanded part of the British troops in Ceylon, in 1799, 

 not long after the island had been captured from the Dutch 

 by the British, that there was at that time in the elephant 

 stables at Matura a decoy elephant which the records 

 proved had been taken from the Portuguese by the Dutch 

 in 1656, and which had served his new masters for 140 

 years; at the expiration of this period it fell into the hands 

 of the British.* 



*Sir J. Emerson Tennent, "Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon, including a 

 monograph on the Elephant," London, 1861, p. 233. 



