Chap. VI.] 
THE ELEPHANT. 
197 
in to loose the ropes that bound him, from the tree, and 
two tame elephants being harnessed to the dead body, it 
was dragged to a distance without the corral. 
When every wild elephant had been noosed and tied 
up, the scene presented was truly oriental. From one to 
two thousand natives, many of them in gaudy dresses and 
armed with spears, crowded about the enclosures. Their 
speed with, which, they hurry to it 
from all directions ; often from dis- 
tances as extraordinary, proportion- 
ably, as those traversed by the eye 
of the vulture. In the instance of 
the dying elephant referred to 
above, life was barely extinct when 
the flies, of which not one was 
visible but a moment before, arrived 
in clouds and blackened the body 
by their multitude; scarcely an 
instant was allowed to elapse for 
the commencement of decompo- 
sition; no odour of putrefaction 
could be discerned by us who stood 
close by ; yet some peculiar smell 
of mortality, simultaneously with 
parting breath, must have sum- 
moned them to the feast. Ants 
exhibit an instinct equally sur- 
prising. I have sometimes covered 
up a particle of refined sugar with 
paper on the centre of a polished 
table ; and counted the number of 
minutes which would elapse before 
it was fastened on by the small 
black ants of Ceylon, and a line 
formed to lower it safely to the 
floor. Here was a substance which, 
to our apprehension at least, is 
altogether inodorous, and yet the 
quick sense of smell must have 
been the only conductor of the 
ants. It has been observed of 
those fishes which travel overland 
on the evaporation of the ponds in 
which they live, that they invari- 
ably march in the direction of the 
nearest water, and even when cap- 
tured, and placed on the floor of 
a room, their efforts to escape are 
always made towards the same 
point. Is the sense of smell suffi- 
cient to account for this display of 
instinct in them ? or is it aided by 
special organs in the case of the 
others ? Dr. Mc Gee, formerly of 
the Koyal Navy, writing to me on 
the subject of the instant appear- 
ance of flies in the vicinity of dead 
bodies, says : "In warm climates 
they do not wait for death to in- 
vite them to the banquet. In 
Jamaica I have again and again 
seen them settle on a patient, and 
hardly to be driven away by the 
nurse, the patient himself saying, 
'Here are these flies coming to 
eat me ere I am dead.' At times 
they have enabled the doctor, when 
otherwise he would have been in 
doubt as to his prognosis, to deter- 
mine whether the strange apyretic 
interval occasionally present in the 
last stage of yellow fever was the 
fatal lull or the lull of recovery : 
and ' What say the flies ?' has been 
the settling question. Among many, 
many cases during a long period I 
have seen but one recovery after 
the assembling of the flies. I con- 
sider the foregoing as a confir- 
mation of smell being the guide 
even to the attendants, a cada- 
verous smell has been perceived to 
arise from the body of a patient 
twenty-four hours before death." 
o 3 
