AN IMITATIVE ANIMAL. 
289 
freshest and most verdant parts of the forest; and 
when one district becomes parched and barren, he 
will forsake it for years together, and wander far 
and wide in quest of other and better pastures. 
It is a commonly received opinion, I believe, that 
the elephant always sleeps standing, or reclining, it 
may be, against a tree or rock; or, as regards 
Southern Africa, against one of those gigantic ant¬ 
hills* one there so frequently meets with ; but this 
is not altogether the case; for though, as a rule, 
this may be his usual mode of reposing, yet in 
regions where he is but little molested, he is not 
unfrequently found stretched at full length on the 
sward; and, in saying this, I am fully borne out 
by my friend Frederick Green, who, like myself, 
was at one time somewhat sceptical as to the ele¬ 
phant ever sleeping otherwise than in an upright 
position. 
The elephant, according to Delegorgue, is a 
very imitative animal—very much more so, I con¬ 
fess, than I ever had the most distant idea of; 
for, after speaking of a herd of those animals 
recently disturbed by himself and party, he goes on 
to say:— 
A portion of the troop ought, from the nature 
of the country, to have passed within two hundred 
paces of us, but as they made for the river, where 
* My ideas of the nests of the termites, or white ants, were first 
realised at Schmelens Hope, a missionary station in Damara Land, 
some of the abodes of these interesting, though destructive, insects 
measuring as much as one hundred feet in diameter at the base, and 
rising to about twenty feet in height. 
U 
