1850.] Brdhminical Conquerors of India, 37 



bring an elephant, and that elephant is an Indian one, they are neces- 

 sarily Indians, — by which I understand dwellers on the banks of the 

 Indus, — at least as necessarily as the habitat, otherwise doubtful, of the 

 nation acknowledged to be Ethiopian is decided by their bringing with 

 them a giraffe. 



As I have placed the elephant upon the Indus, or in spots imme- 

 diately adjacent to it, and as that animal is not now, to the best of my 

 knowledge, found wild nearer the Sutlej even, than in the Dera valley, 

 at the lower extremity whereof the Ganges leaves the hills, I am bound 

 to give reasons for assigning, even at so remote a period, that locus 

 habitationis to a creature, no longer heard of there. As late then as 

 1519 A. D., the rhinoceros, the shyest and most skulking of the larger 

 pachyderms, was an ordinary object of chase on the Indus, and in the 

 Punjab, on the authority of that most accurate and intelligent of auto- 

 biographers, the Emperor Baber (Baber's Memoirs by Leyden, 

 pp. 253, 292, 316.). As the animals affect similar covers, if the ele- 

 phant were not there at that time, which Baber does not mention, he 

 must have been harassed out of the country by centuries of pursuit, 

 which the rhinoceros, being almost valueless but for his hide to make 

 shields of, had escaped. But Baber mentions the wild elephant at 

 places, strange to modern ears, as Calpee,* and Currah Manickpore 

 (p. 315), — about Chunar (p. 407) ; while he notes, in another place, the 

 lion and rhinoceros near Benares. If the argument, ( they were not 

 because they are not,' be untenable on the evidence of three centuries, 

 how ten times less against the silent inferences of thirty ? 



These Rot-ii-no then were a people from about the banks of the 

 Indus, or beyond it, who came into communication with the Egyptians, 

 about 1 6 centuries before our era ; but on the received idea of an 

 Indian, that is, of a black or brown man, inhabiting a torrid climate, 

 these fair-complexioned, blue-eyed, red-bearded strangers appear in- 



* Within the last twenty years I have known the elephant, wild, though not in 

 herds, in the bed of the old Ganges, not far from Meerut in the Doab, and the 

 extinction of the lion in Hurriana has happened within that time : this animal was 

 shot on the banks of the Chumbul, not very many years ago. I may mention that 

 the present habitat of the rhinoceros is no where further west than the jangals of 

 Pillibheet in Rohilkhand, — so much, with the cultivation and desiccation of coun- 

 tries, does the locale of their wild tenants vary. — H. T. 



