CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH ii 



It would be tedious to go through mammals group by group, 

 making the same general statements about them. Differences of 

 colour and pattern in the coat are often remarkable and will be 

 discussed in a separate chapter (Chapter VI). When the adults have 

 no special weapons or ornaments, they can be distinguished from 

 their young by little that is visible, except size. A young hippo- 

 potamus, except for the absence of tusks, a young dromedary or 

 bactrian camel, except that the humps are not so conspicuous, and 

 a kangaroo, as soon as it is able to leave the pouch of its mother, 

 are almost ludicrously exact miniatures of their parents. Baby 

 elephants are more interesting. The smallest that I have seen 

 was a female Indian elephant, presented to the London Zoological 

 Gardens by the Government of the Federated Malay States, and 

 certainly less than a year old and about three feet in height. No 

 one could mistake it for anything but an elephant, but it was 

 thickly covered with long coarse hair, recalling its distant relative, 

 the extinct hairy mammoth. Its ears were much larger in propor- 

 tion to the size of the head than in the adult Indian elephant, so 

 recalling the African animal, and this resemblance was increased 

 by the smoothly rounded forehead, passing in an even curve from 

 the root of the trunk to the top of the head, and showing no sign of 

 the angular forehead of adult Indian elephants. Its trunk was 

 rather short, the tip being well off the ground when the little animal 

 was standing upright, and was rather an embarrassment to it. It 

 found difficulty in finding its mouth with it, fumbling as a baby does 

 when trying to use a spoon. Nor had it learned to use it in drinking ; 

 it sucked its milk by a rubber tube placed in its mouth, holding its 

 trunk awkwardly out of the way. No doubt if we could see together 

 a young Indian elephant, a young African elephant and a young 

 mammoth, we should find that they were as much alike as are the 

 young of the great apes and man. 



A young giraffe (see Plate II) from the first resembles its parents, 

 but neither its neck nor its legs are so long in proportion, and the 

 horns, although erect and tufted with hair like those of the adult, 

 are soft because they have no bony core. In the great assemblage 

 of animals that are armed with horns or antlers the peculiarities of 

 these weapons appear gradually, and the young, at first defenceless, 

 produce little straight spikes like those of their fossil ancestors, and 

 these, as they grow larger, curve or twist or branch until they reach 

 the fuU splendour of maturity. In antelopes, sheep, goats and 

 cattle, where the horns are "hollow," that is to say, where they 



