44 Animal Life in South Africa. 



they, in tlieir turn, like all other living creatures, exercise on 

 their habitat, should not escape a short notice. 



On the borders of the Cape Colony and Natal, we find the 

 few elephants that remain large in size, but with comparatively 

 small tusks of inferior ivory. As we approach the equator, 

 although food is far more plentiful, we find the animals smaller 

 in size, having far larger tusks, the latter too being of an ivory 

 far superior in hardness and closeness of grain. Indeed, although 

 naturalists have not recognized more than one species of the 

 African elephant, the varieties of ivory exported from the 

 north, west, south-west, south-east coast, and the Cape, have 

 each marked differences of quality by which they are easily 

 recognizable. The animals in their turn, however, likewise 

 affect the economy of the country they inhabit. The damage 

 done even by a single elephant in a very short time to a patch 

 of cultivated ground is truly frightful, and having been once 

 seen, would lead one to imagine that when these animals are 

 herded together in vast troops such as the one seen by Dr. 

 Livingstone on the banks of the Zambesi, consisting of over 

 eight hundred, covering an extent of two miles of country, 

 their course would be marked by utter desolation. The 

 havoc thus caused is not however perceptible, a fact which 

 that observant traveller has attributed, no doubt rightly, to 

 the care shown by the elephants in the selection of their 

 food — a point, as he justly remarks, often overlooked in esti- 

 mating the quantity of food required by the larger animals. 



Again, all these animals, rhinoceri and hippopotami in- 

 cluded, are, as M. Krapf observed, the true pioneers, "the 

 real pathmakers of the tropical forest, which without their 

 tracks would be often utterly impenetrable to man/' Further, 

 these paths leading as they most frequently do, to water, are 

 often the only open channels for the surface-flow of the heavy 

 rainfalls, and thus materially contribute to the continuance 

 of the water supply of the district, to the very existence of 

 which they owe their formation. "While the elephant does not 

 thus destroy vegetation which would ruin the shelter which 

 appears indispensable to him, on the other hand he directly 

 assists the production of new growths by his habit of searching 

 for the many succulent bulbs to be found below the surface of 

 the soil in every open space. 



Mr. Gordon Cumming, in whose time elephants were more 

 plentiful in the neighbourhood of the colonial frontier, than 

 they are at the present, described large patches of many 

 acres each in extent, as being thus ploughed up to a depth of 

 several inches by the tusks of the elephants in quest of roots 

 and bulbs ; thus doubtless bringing to the surface germs of 

 a fresh vegetation which would otherwise lie dormant. It is 



