282 



LIVING AND EXTINCT ELEPHANTS. 



of the Mammoth, but it is in reality a molar, disguised and 

 blackened by smoke, of an Asiatic Elephant which had died 

 in captivity. The back plates, in this case, are pressed and 

 crowded upwards so as to have become nearly horizontal. 

 Similar instances are figured by De Blainville, 1 without his 

 having been aware of the nature and cause of the distortion. 



The Elephants kept in the menageries m Europe are all, 

 more or less, in this morbid condition of the dental system. 

 They are fed on rations composed largely of turnips, carrots, 

 mangold-wurzel, and of mashes of boiled rice, bran, sea- 

 biscuit, and chaff, &c. The only hard and dry food issued 

 to them consists of a truss or two of hay, and the straw used 

 for their litter. Ligneous food, such as they partly live upon 

 in the wild state, is denied to them, and the results are so 

 certain, that one can anywhere point out in a museum the 

 molar of an Elephant which has been kept in captivity. For 

 obvious reasons, the effects, although still discernible, are 

 less pronounced in the molars of Elephants which have been 

 retained in bondage in their native country. 



The bearing of these observations upon the normal condi- 

 tion of teeth of the Mammoth, and its inferred alimentary 

 habits, will be shown in the sequel. 



(6.) Food of the African Elephant. — The alimentary habits 

 of the Indian species are so well known, simply from the 

 fact, that being tamed one can observe from his back, in 

 beating through his native jungles, everything which he 

 selects and all that he passes by. The same close observa- 

 tion cannot be applied to the African form, as at the present 

 day he is nowhere hi his native continent trained for the use 

 of man. Our knowledge of his food is, therefore, of a vague 

 and general character, being derived from the cursory obser- 

 vation of travellers, whose attention was not specially directed 

 to the subject. 



The molar teeth of the African Elephant are intermediate, 

 in construction and triturating characters, between those of 

 the Euelephantes, or Elephants proper, and the fossil Stego- 

 dons. They present, in the three intermediate and last 

 molars for the ridge-formula, the successive ciphers 7 : 7, 8, 

 10; while E. antiquus presents the ciphers 10 : 10, 12, 16, 

 and E. primigenius and E. Indicus, 12 : 12, 16, 24. The 

 aggregate of the series of ridges in the first amounts only to 

 32 ; in the second to 48 ; and in the two last to 64 ; involving 

 a great difference in the triturating mechanism of the teeth. 

 In the African form the molars are also shorter, narrower, 



authority of the work, as a characteristic 

 specimen of E. primigenius. ( Vide M6- 

 moiros Acad. Montpell., torn. i. p. 423, 



PL xv. fig. 9.) 



1 Ost6ographie : Elephant, 

 fig. 6, and PI. x. fig. 6. 



PI. 



