196 IVORY AND THE ELEPHANT 



ment of Pliny that the African natives caught them in great 

 ditches dug out for this purpose. He adds as a proof of the 

 animals' devotion to one another that when one of them 

 fell into such a ditch, all the others of the herd came to his 

 rescue, heaping up boughs and rolling down blocks and 

 stones and any other material at hand to fill up the ditch, 

 and making the most strenuous efforts to rescue the captured 

 animal.* 



In the old cosmographies the various lands and the main 

 divisions of the earth were often specially marked by the 

 figure of the animal most characteristic of the region, and 

 for Africa, more especially for Central Africa, this was in- 

 variably the elephant. The satirist Swift wings one of his 

 shafts in this connection in the following lines : 



"So geographers, in Afric maps, 

 With savage pictures fill their gaps. 

 And o'er inhabitable downs 

 Place elephants for want of towns." 



Although ivory was so often employed for ecclesiastical 

 ornaments and for the adornment of the covers of devotional 

 books, the churchman, Thomas de Cantimpre (born at 

 Leuwis near Brussels in 1201), or his interpreter, Konrad 

 von Megenberg (b. 1309), seems to show a surprising 

 unfamiliarity with the true source of this beautiful material. 

 Von Megenberg, in his old German translation of De 

 Cantimpre's unpublished "De Rerum Natura," writing 

 of the "helfant," as he calls it, states that when it was 

 hunted it would fall down upon the ground or upon the 

 stones and would thus break its bone; and it was for this 

 the animal was hunted because "helfenpain" (elfenbein) 

 or "elephant bone" was a most prized object. Possibly 



*Plinii, "Naturalis Historia," Lib. VIII, Cap. viii, 



