284 
THE ELEPHANT. 
have been of little or no use, was probably another 
of the causes why the elephant was again permitted 
to range his native haunts in unrestricted liberty. 
It used to be a popular notion that female ele¬ 
phants, captured when pregnant, showed the 
greatest possible aversion to their young when, 
at an after-period, they came into the world, and 
not only refused to suckle, but actually ill-treated 
them when they attempted to lay hold of the teat. 
It was formerly believed, also, that the male ele¬ 
phant, when reduced to a state of captivity, would 
not propagate his species; some imagining that 
this was owing to his possessing the sentiment of 
modesty in an unusually high degree; others, that 
his feelings for the loss of liberty were so acute as to 
cause him to refuse obedience to the laws of nature, 
lest he should entail on his progeny a fate similar 
to his own. There were those, again, who asserted 
that he lost the power of procreation when in 
thraldom. 
But all these idle fallacies have long since been 
exploded. To say nothing of the ancient Homans 
breeding the elephant when in confinement (as may 
be safely inferred from the figure of a female in the 
act of suckling her calf depicted on the walls of 
Pompeii) there is, in the Transactions of the Philo¬ 
sophical Society of London, in the year 1799, a 
long and elaborate article on the habits of the 
elephant, which must convince the most sceptical 
that we have been labouring under a delusion. The 
evidence, however, of Mr. Corse, who had for a 
number of years the entire management of several 
