6 
THE MALAYSIAN UNGULATES. 
mal and the enormous amount of food it must, require. Ele- 
phants are herbivorous. They are accordingly supplied with 
gigantic molars (16" long, -4" wide) for crushing their food. 
As these wear out they are replaced by others moving up from 
behind. The bones of the skull are exceptionally thick, but 
the weight is counterbalanced by large air-cavities in the skull 
above the brain. 
Ivory tusks, which, as already noted, are incisors and not 
canines as in the pig or hippopotamus, are usually developed 
in the males and occasionally in the females. Big tusks 
reach from 5 to 8 feet in length, 16 to 17 inches in circum- 
ference at the base and up to 100 lbs, in weight the pair; in 
the Indian form up to 150 lbs. Hubback states that big 
tuskers in the Malay Peninsula seldom carry tusks weighing 
over 60 U», the pair. He mentions one said to have 
been shot by Lel>ai Jemal, a Malay, in Jelebu many years 
ago whose tusks weighed over a plkul (133 If lbs,), but 
adds “ I am inclined to think that their weight must have 
increased with old Lebai’s age!” In breaking olF branches 
of trees with its trunk the elephant breaks them against its 
tusks. Both trunk and tusks are also used for defensive 
purposes. 
The biggest elephant Hubback himself ever shot in the 
Malay Peninsula measured 9 ft. 3 in. at the shoulder. The 
average height is between 8 and 9 ft. A giant skeleton in the 
Indian Museum stands over 11 ft, and when alive the animal 
must have measured about 1^ ft. A curious point is that 
twice the circumference of the fore foot is said to equal the 
height at the shoulder. 
The weight of an 8 ft. elephant is between 2 and 3 tons. 
Occasionally so-called white elephants, which are really 
albinos, are found. Among other abnormalities, Hubback 
records having shot an old one without the vestige of a tail ; 
he scouts the idea that it could have been lost through fight- 
ing, although it is well-known that elephants do bite off por- 
tions of one another’s tails when fighting. 
Elephants have been known to live in captivity for over 
a century and it is thought that an age of 150 years is not an 
excessive estimate for the age of an elephant in the wild state. 
The Indian Elephant ranges from India and Ceylon east- 
wards to Siam, Cochin-China, and Malaysia (excluding Java), 
Those found in the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra have 
been given distinctive names as separate subspecies, while the 
elephant in North Borneo, which was almost certainly intro- 
duced from the Malay Peninsula, is probably inseparable 
from that form. That the Elephant was at one time indi- 
genous in Borneo is proved by the discovery by Shelford of a 
