MY LIFE IN THE ANIMAL TRADE 29. 
in this matter, and in the year 1883 I exported from Ceylon 
no fewer than sixty-seven elephants. 
In this place I ought to say a few words about Joseph 
Menges. He assuredly deserves a short biographical notice 
in this history of my business, for of all the fellow-workers 
with whom it has been my fate to labour, none has been 
more able and efficient. When this traveller joined my 
firm in 1876 he had already had considerable experience 
as an explorer. In the early seventies he had gone up the 
White Nile with Gordon, and few, if any, Europeans knew 
the Sudan better than he. He had become intimately ac- 
quainted with the peoples, the geography, the fauna and the 
flora of Nubia. He was, moreover, thoroughly accustomed 
to the climate. In those regions Europeans almost invariably 
suffer severely from fever, but Menges seems to have been 
immune—at all events, by the time he began to travel in 
my interests. On one occasion he brought to Europe for one 
of my ethnographic exhibitions some representatives of the 
famous Nubian tribe, the Hamran hunters, of whose man- 
ners and customs I shall have much to relate in Chapter III. 
Then he paid a visit to Somaliland, where he explored a 
district where no white man had hitherto been, and dis- 
covered a new race of wild ass. He succeeded in trans- 
porting to Europe a living specimen of this quadruped. 
Menges continued to lead hunting expeditions on my behalf 
until quite recently, and at the moment of writing there are 
still animals in my menagerie which have come into my pos- 
session through the energy of this trusty friend. 
One of the largest of all my ethnographic exhibitions was. 
the great Cingalese exhibition of 1884. This great caravan, 
which consisted of sixty-seven persons with twenty-five 
elephants and a multitude of cattle of various breeds, caused 
a great sensation in Europe. I travelled about with this 
show all over Germany and Austria, and made a very good 
thing out of it. 
When this Cingalese exhibition had come to an end 
