185 
tusks.” We have here the picture complete. Look at the 
curved tusks in the engraving. 
Even the modern elephant can be a formidable antagonist. 
I extract from Dr. Falconer (p. 259) the account of the 
death of a “ Goondah,” or wild elephant, which for a long 
time was the terror of a district in India. “It was killed in the 
jungles on the banks of the Ganges, at no great distance 
from Meerut, in May, 1833, by a party of four experienced 
sportsmen, who went out for the express purpose of killing it. 
The savage animal made no fewer than twenty-three desperate 
and gallant charges against a battery of at least sixteen double- 
barrel guns to which it was exposed on each occasion, and fell 
after several hours with its skull literally riddled with bullets.’”* 
The old commentators probably thought that the elephant 
was unknown in Arabia, but we now understand that the ele- 
phant abounded in the neighbouring district of Mesopotamia, 
in the days of Thothmes III., about 1500 years B.C., who, in 
a campaign against Nineveh, captured on a hunting expedition, 
one hundred and twenty wild elephants. f In the ninth century 
B.C. the same creature is represented on the Black Obelisk of 
Shalmanezer II. as part of the tribute brought by the tribe 
called Muzzi, from the headquarters of the Tigris to the 
Assyrian monarch. It had no doubt been exterminated in 
the interval from the plains of Mesopotamia, as at a pre- 
ceding period it had been from the banks of the Jordan and 
the forests of Arabia. 
There can be little donbt that at some period the elephant, 
or mammoth, extended from the head-waters of the Tigris to 
the forests of Siberia. 
There is in fact scarcely any limit to be placed to the migra- 
tions of the elephant family in some one of their forms, of which 
we have now several but sadly degenerate representations. 
I conclude that we have good ground for believing that the 
description of the Behemoth in the book of Job is that of a 
then existing form of the Eleplias primigenius, symbolizing 
with the now extinct mammoth, in the curved tusks, the 
gigantic stature, the waving and bushy tail, and not impro- 
bably also in the character of its food, and of its teeth fitted 
for the mastication of a somewhat indiscriminate vegetable diet. 
The now submerged forests of the shores of Britain seem to 
have furnished the sustenance exactly fitted to the wants of 
this huge creature, which appears to have abounded therein. 
* The skull is now in the British Museum. 
+ See Appendix 0. 
