224 IVORY AND THE ELEPHANT 



be taken to indicate that cavities in a tusk might really 

 cause an elephant to suffer exquisite pain.* 



One of the finest collections of the abnormal growths 

 sometimes to be observed in elephant tusks, as well as of 

 tusks with encysted bullets, was presented by Mr. Charles 

 H. Wood to the Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences. There 

 are 120 specimens, thirty -four of these showing inclusions 

 of bullets or spear points. When the bullets are of lead, the 

 metal is generally scattered more or less, and has affected 

 the ivory differently than in the case of steel bullets. It 

 is said to poison the dentine, frequently causing large exos- 

 totic growths, exhibiting strange and abnormal bulbous or 

 spicular forms, and hollow spaces often of large size. These 

 tumors are designated odontoma, a term applied by Vir- 

 chow to ivory exostosis of the teeth of elephants, especially 

 of the molars, these exostotic growths being composed of 

 hypertrophied dentine and resulting from morbid conditions 

 of the pulp of tusk or tooth. On the other hand, in several 

 instances where steel bullets were found, the ivory was only 

 partly decomposed or absorbed away from the bullet, 

 leaving it loose in a hollow enclosure, and thus making 

 a kind of ivory rattle. Single examples of exostosis are 

 6 in. in length and 3J in. in diameter, being stalacti- 

 tic or stalagmitic in character, or columnar with rounded 

 protuberances. In one case 50 of these bulbous excres- 

 censes appear on a piece of abnormal growth 4 in. high 

 and IJ in. wide. In another example a hollow second- 

 ary tusk had formed within the natural hollow, the interior 

 piece measuring 7J by 6^ in. across and being exceed- 

 ingly thin. In a very peculiar instance a flattened bullet 

 was found encysted in the hollow rim end of the tusk, where 

 it was only three eighths of an inch wide, but a growth an 



*Sir J. Emerson Tennent, "Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon," London, 1861, 

 pp. 227, 228. 



