Chap. 4.] 
ELEPHAOTS. 
247 
CHAP. 4. WOIfDEKFUL THINGS WHICH HAVE BEEN DONE BY THE 
ELEPHANT. 
These animals are well aware that the only spoil that we 
are anxious to procure of them is the part which forms their 
weapon of defence, by Juba, called their horns, but by He- 
rodotus, a much older writer, as well as by general usage and 
more appropriately, their teeth. Hence it is that, when their 
tusks have fallen oif, either by accident or from old age, they 
bury them in the earth. These tusks form the only real ivory, 
and, even in these, the part which is covered by the flesh is 
merely common bone, and of no value whatever ; though, in- 
deed, of late, in consequence of the insufficient supply of ivory, 
they have begun to cut the bones as well into thin plates. 
Large teeth, in fact, are now rarely found, except in India, the 
demands of luxury having exhausted all those in our part of 
the worldv The youthfulness of the animal is ascertained by 
the whiteness of the teeth. Thege animals take the greatest 
care of their teeth ; they pay especial attention to the point of 
one of them, that it may not be found blunt when wanted for 
combat ; the other they employ for various purposes, such as 
digging up roots and pushing forward heavy weights. "When 
they are surrounded by the hunters, they place those in front 
which have the smallest teeth, that the enemy may think that 
the spoil is not worth the combat ; and afterwards, when 
they are weary of resistance, they break off their teeth, by 
As to the tusks of the elephant, no doubt the opinion of Herodotus, 
B. iii. c. 97, is correct, that they are teeth, and not horns. They are essen- 
tially composed of the same substance with the other teeth, and, like them, 
are inserted into the jaw, and not into the os frontis, as is the case with 
horns. — B. 
1® Not improbably, the great quantity of fossil ivory which has been 
found, may have given rise to this tale. We have in Lemaire, vol. iii. p. 
581, a long extract from Cuvier's " Mecherches sur les ossements fossiles," 
in which he gives an account of the parts of the world in which the bones 
of the elephant have been discovered. — B. 
19 Tables and bedsteads were not only covered or veneered with ivory 
among the Romans, but, in the later times, made of the solid material, as 
we learn from ^lian and Athenseus. 
20 Plutarch, in his treatise on the Shrewdness of Animals, gives the 
same statement respecting the whiteness of the teeth in the young animal. 
— B. 
