Chap. VII.] 
THE ELEPHANT. 
235 
not apply to the grinders or to the tusks ; besides which, 
the inference is at variance with the fact, that not only 
the horns and teeth, but entire skeletons of deer, are 
frequently found in the districts inhabited by the ele- 
phant. 
The natives, to account for this popular belief, declare 
that the survivors of the herd bury such of their com- 
panions as die a natural death. 1 It is curious that this 
belief was current also amongst the Greeks of the Lower 
Empire ; and Phile, writing early in the fourteenth 
century, not only describes the younger elephants as 
tending the wounded, but as burying the dead : 
<<f/ Orav 8' sttlo-tt} ttj? ts\svtt]s 6 %povo5 
Kolvov tsXovs dfivvav 6 %svos (pspsi." 2 
The Singhalese have a further superstition in relation 
to the close of life in the elephant : they believe that, on 
feeling the approach of dissolution, he repairs to a solitary 
valley, and there resigns himself to death. A native 
who accompanied Mr. Cripps, when hunting, in the 
forests of Anarajapoora, intimated to him that he was 
then in the immediate vicinity of the spot <( to which 
the elephants come to die," but that it was so mysteriously 
concealed, that although every one believed in its exist- 
1 A corral was organised near was complete. The wild elephants 
Putlam in 1846, by Mr. Morris, resumed their path through it, and 
the chief officer of the district. It a few days afterwards the headman 
was constructed across one of the reported to Mr. Morris that the 
paths which the elephants frequent bodies had been removed and 
in their frequent marches, and carried outside the corral to a spot 
during the course of the proceedings to which nothing but the elephants 
two of the captured elephants died, could have borne them. 
Their carcases were left of course 2 Phile, Expositio de Elegit. 1. 
within the enclosure, which was 243. 
abandoned as soon as the capture 
