CHAPTER XI. 
THE ELEPHANT, TAPIR, HYRAX, AND RHINOCEROS. 
THE ELEPHANT. 
BY F. C. SELOUS. 
T once the mightiest and most majestic of all terrestrial 
mammals, the elephant appeals to the imagination 
more forcibly than any other living animal, not only 
on account of its great sagacity and the strangeness and 
singularity of its outward appearance, but also because it is such 
an obvious link between the world of to-day and the dim and 
distant past of Pleiocene and Miocene times. 
There are two existing species of elephant, the AFRICAN and 
the Asratic, the latter, from the structure of its molar teeth and 
the shape of its skull, appearing to be very nearly related to the 
Mammnotna, which lived upon the earth in comparatively recent 
times—geologically speaking—and was undoubtedly contem- 
porary with man in Europe during the Stone Age. 
There are very considerable differences both in the external 
appearance and also in the habits of the two existing forms of 
elephant. In the African species the forehead is more convex 
and the eye relatively larger than in its Asiatic cousin; and 
whilst the ears of the latter are only of moderate size, those of 
the former are so large that they at once arrest the attention, 
and are one of that animal’s most remarkable external character- 
istics. Both sexes of the African species, with few exceptions, 
carry well-developed tusks, but in the Asiatic form the tusks of 
the females are so small as scarcely to protrude beyond the jaws. 
" Phote by M. RF, Baird, Esq. In Asia, too, tuskless bull elephants are common, whilst males 
A FINE TUSKER of the African species without tusks are extremely rare. The 
The male Indian elephant has smaller tusks latter species has but three nails on the hind foot, the Asiatic 
than the African species elephant four. In the African species the middle of the back is 
hollowed, the shoulder being the highest point, whilst in the Asiatic 
elephant the back is arched, and the top of the shoulder lower than the highest part of the back. 
The extremity of the proboscis is also different in the two species, the African elephant being 
furnished with two nearly equal-sized prolongations, the one on the front, the other on the hinder 
margin, with which small objects can be grasped as with the finger and thumb of the human 
hand, whilst in the Asiatic species the finger-like process on the upper margin of the end of the 
trunk is considerably longer than that on the under-side. In external appearance the skin of the 
African elephant is darker in colour and rougher in texture than that of the Asiatic form. The 
molar teeth of the former animal are, too, of much coarser construction, with fewer and larger 
plates and thicker enamel than in the latter, which would naturally lead one to suppose that the 
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