832 
THE TROPICAL 
AGRICULTURIST. 
[June 1, 1901, 
lb was not, however, the month for eorgeous sun- 
sets, and tins one, from a purely seemic point of 
view, was not extraordinary. .Sinking and ever 
sinking, great Sol soon reached the Ijoandary line 
where substance and shallow merge into one 
another. Here he stood for a moment, poised 
upon a hill top, and then sank peacefully into 
oblivion. 
A Q.UIKT TWILIGHT 
now pervaded everything, but, on looking back 
upon Coonoor, alas ! and alas ! " what a falling 
off was there." Only a few minutes before she 
had worn a bright smiling face ; with the depar- 
ture of the sun, however, a sombre gloom had 
succeeded, in which the Drooa; stood out excep- 
tionally forbidding in appearance and possessing a 
savage grandeur all its own. Yet a little while, 
and the scene was still fuither changed. Cloud 
upon cloud, masses of them, a whole army corps 
of them, floated down from the surrounding hili.s 
upon luckless Coonoor and ill-fated Wellington, 
One moment, and both the townships with their 
environments were in full view under a deep grey 
pall; the next, and the canopy had descended, 
blotting out and enveloping everything in a fleecy 
mist. A wind, starting from somewhere behind 
cloudland, had now arisen, and as one body 
THE PHANTOM ARMY BEGAN TO MOVE UPON 
DODABETTA. 
Soon, immeasurably soon, it had traversed the 
intervening valley and had arrived at the foot of 
the heights. As wave upon wave the Heeey clouds 
came rolling along, a rent in their substance 
occurred and for an instant revealed to view, 
below in the valley beneath, a Badaga home- 
stead, or a cultivated field with a swathed figure 
travelling over it. The next moment, and, as if 
angry at its interior being revealed, a huge billow 
charged up, and again nothing existed but chaos. 
Phantom figures, too, with widespread sheeted 
arms, dashed themselves in frenzy against jagged 
rocks, were torn to shreils and partially dis- 
solved, only to reappear the next moment, and, 
having donned forms a trilie more fantastic, to 
travel on, and ever on. But by this time 
THE NIGHT RACK CAME ROLLING UP. 
In another moment the heights had been gained 
and, standing up there, the phantasmagoria 
passed one in endless review order. Leaving 
detachments to hold the hollows and sweep the 
crests, it immediately rolled down towards Ootaca- 
mund. Looking thitherwards, a transformation 
in the scene was all apparent, the spirit of her 
beauty being essentially clouded. Twilight had 
almost departed and the town was wrapped in 
gloom, rendered almost impenetrable in corners 
wooiled with blue-gum. The only physical 
feature which remained unchanged was the lake, 
wl.ieh shone in all its purity, like a huge crucible 
full of molten silver. Then a breeze troubled its 
surface and it became ruffled. At this instant 
the rough portions caught a few departing rays 
of sunlight and lightened up wiih a deep crimson 
glory, which gradually toned away into shades of 
blue — into hiovi'n as darkness began to arrive — 
into giey as the mist next swooped down — and 
into indiscernible nothing as night (accompanied 
by squally gusi s of wind) settled upon the land- 
.scape and assumed sway, clothing the world with 
chilly [i'Avkii^Hfi.-'Madras Mail, Api'il 26. 
THE AFRICAN ELEPHANT, 
(To the Editor of the London " Standard.") 
Sir, — It is discouraging to learn from books of 
travel like " The Cape to Cairo" that the rerkless 
.slaughter of this magnificent animal is still going 
on so relentlessly that in a very few years it must 
become extinct. The same book tells us that these 
elephants make their way through th^ den.se bush 
in a marvellous way, and thus might ;:rove most 
valuable as a means of transpoi t into the interior, 
and so help to solve one great difficulty in the 
civilisation of Africa. 
Why has no serious effort yet been made to 
domesticate the animal ? Could not we, with our 
Indian experience, establish a colony of experi- 
enced Indian trainers anrl drivers in our East 
African possessions ? We know that the ancient 
Carthaginians were very successfu' in taming and 
training the elephant, an<l it is said that the 
Jesuit missionaries in Angola have done it. Is it 
not a stigma upon us that nothing of this sort has 
yet been attempted '! 
I am, Sir, your obedient servant, 
Shrewsbury, April 4. A GRADUATE. 
The persecution of the African elephant by 
sportsnien and others is lamented by a correspon- 
dent whose letter we publish this morning. This 
magnificent animal is not, perhaps, so near extinc- 
tion as some recent accounts would seem to 
suggest. Indeed, the convention recently made 
between the countries most interested should 
serve to check indisciiniinate butchery. Unfortu- 
nately, however, the increase of man means the 
decrease of the beasts of the field. The great 
herbivorous creatures have large appetite-, and 
prefer the fruits of cultivation to those of nature. 
A full-sized pacnyderm in a maize field or kitchen- 
garden is about as bad as a bull in a china shop ; 
we can hardly wonder, therefore, that the 
settlers wage war on big came. Efforts were made 
to preserve a small herd of hippopotami in one 
'of the Natal rivers, but they became such 
marauders that they had to be killed off. This 
was unfortunate, for they, like the rhinoceros and 
elephant, are old-time creatures, and their lum- 
bering forms seem constructed after ancient 
patterns. The elephant has alone lived on this 
earth longer than man ; it matie its way to these 
islands some time in advance of its future 
destroyer. But the genus once had a wider range 
than now. It has been found in all the great 
regions of the globe except Australia and South 
America, though in the Northern Continent of 
the JNew World a closely allied genus,, called the 
mastodon, was more common. Even the Maltese 
Islands had a couple of species which, in har- 
mony with their restricted range, were pigmy 
forms, about the size of donkeys. In our own 
islands primreval man, when he had no better 
weapons than roughly-clipped flints, must have 
some time hunted the ancestors both of the 
Indian and African elephants. The former, well 
known to us as the mammoth, was quite at home 
in a cold climate, for it had developed a woolly 
covering to keep itself warm. It ranged to the 
extreme North of Asia, and its carcase has been 
found frozen up in mud and ice on the Siberian 
Tundras. In fact, unlike the modern Indian ele- 
phant, which is undoubtedly its descendant, it 
seems to have disliked warmth, for in Europe it 
hradly reaches the extreme South, while the 
ancestors of the African elephant never wan(iere4 
