76 
MAMMALIA. 
[Chap. II. 
in which elephants may not be said to abound; even 
close to the environs of the most populous localities of 
the interior. They frequent both the open plains and 
the deep forests; and their footsteps are to be seen 
wherever food and shade, vegetation and water l , allure 
1 M. Ad. Picxet has availed 
himself of the love of the elephant 
for water, to found on it a solution 
of the long-contested question as 
to the etymology of the word 
" elephant," — a term which, whilst 
it has passed into almost every dia- 
lect of the West, is scarcely to be 
traced in any language of Asia. 
The Greek e\e(pas, to which we are 
immediately indebted for it, did not 
originally mean the animal, but, as 
early as the time of Homer, was 
applied only to its tusks, and sig- 
nified ivory. Bochart has sought 
for a Semitic origin, and seizing on 
the Arabic fil, and prefixing the 
article al, suggests alfil, akin to 
<=Ae(/> ; but rejecting this, Bochart 
himself resorts to the Hebrew elepk, 
an " ox" — and this conjecture de- 
rives a certain degree of counte- 
nance from the fact that the Eo- 
mans, when they obtained their first 
sight of the elephant in the army 
of Pyrrhus, in Lucania, called it 
the Luca bos. But the avros is 
still unaccounted for; and Pott 
has sought to remove the difficulty 
by introducing the Arabic Mncli, 
Indian, thus making eleph-hindi, 
" bos Indicus" The conversion of 
hindi into avros is an obstacle, but 
here the example of "tamarind" 
comes to aid; tamar hindi, the 
" Indian date," which in mediaeval 
Greek forms ra/xdpevTi. A theory 
of Senary, that 4\4<f>as might be 
compounded of the Arabic al, and 
ibha, a Sanskrit name for the ele- 
phant, is exposed to still greater 
etymological exception. Pictbt's 
solution is, that in the Sanskrit- 
epics "the King of Elephants," Who 
has the distinction of carrying the 
god Indra, is called airavata or 
airdbana, a modification of aira- 
vanta, " son of the ocean," which 
again comes from iravat, "abound- 
ing in water." "Nous aurions 
done ainsi, comme correlatif du 
grec i\4(pavTo, une ancienne forme. 
dirdvanta ou dildvanta, affaiblie 
plus tard en airavata ou airdvana. 
.... On connait la predilection 
de 1' elephant pour le voisinage des 
fleuves, et son amour pour l'eau, 
dont l'abondance est necessaire a 
son bien-etre." This Sanskrit 
name, Pictet supposes, may have 
been carried to the West by the 
Phoenicians, who were the pur- 
veyors of ivory from India ; and, 
from the Greek, the Latins derived 
elephas, which passed into the 
modern languages of Italy, Ger- 
many, and France. But it is curi- 
ous that the Spaniards acquired 
from the Moors their Arabic term 
for ivory, marfil, and the Portu- 
guese marfim ; and that the Scan- 
dinavians, probably from their 
early expeditions to the Mediterra- 
nean, adopted fill as their name for 
the elephant itself, and fil-bein for 
ivory; in Danish, fils-ben. (See 
Journ. Asiat. 1843, t. xliii. p. 133.) 
The Spaniards of South America 
call the palm which produces the 
vegetable ivory (Phytelephas ma- 
crocarpa) Palma de marfil, and the 
nut itself, marfil vegetal. 
Since the above was written 
Gooneratne" Modliar, the Singhalese 
Interpreter to the Supreme Court 
at Colombo, has supplied me with 
