88 MAMMALIA. [Chap. II. 



Placed as the elephant is in Ceylon, in the midst of 

 the most luxuriant profusion of its favourite food, in 

 close proximity at all times to abundant supplies of water, 

 and with no enemies against whom to protect itself, it 

 is difficult to conjecture any probable utility which it 

 could derive from such appendages. Their absence is 

 unaccompanied by any inconvenience to the individuals 

 in whom they are wanting ; and as regards the few who 

 possess them, the only operations in which I am aware 

 of their tusks being employed in relation to the oeconomy 

 of the animal, is to assist in ripping open the stem of 

 the jaggery palms and young palmyras to extract the 

 farinaceous core ; and in splitting the juicy shaft of the 

 plantain. Whilst the tuskless elephant crushes the lat- 

 ter under foot, thereby soiling it and wasting its mois- 

 ture ; the other, by opening it with the point of his tusk, 

 performs the operation with delicacy and apparent ease. 



These, however, are trivial and almost accidental ad- 

 vantages : on the other hand, owing to irregularities in 

 their growth, the tusks are sometimes an impediment in 

 feeding 1 ; and in more than one instance in the Grovern- 

 ment studs, tusks which had so grown as to approach 

 and cross one another at the extremities, have had to be 

 removed by the saw ; the contraction of space between 

 them so impeding the free action of the trunk as to pre- 

 vent the animal from conveying branches to its mouth. 2 



possess, "the elephant which will as before. In the Museum of the 



fight with a stone or a stick in his College of Surgeons, London, there 



trunk." is a specimen, No. 2757, of a spira 



1 Among other eccentric forms, an tusk, 

 elephant was seen in 1844, in the 2 Since the foregoing remarks 



district of Bintenne, near Friar's- were written relative to the unde- 



Hood Mountain, one of whose tusks fined use of tusks to the elephant, 



was so bent that it took what I have seen a speculation on the 



sailors term a "round turn," and same subject in Dr. Holland's 



then resumed its curved direction " Constitution of the Animal Grea- 



