238 
AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 
The carvings of our palaeolithic forefathers, etched on 
bone by cavern dwellers, from whom we are sundered by 
ages which stretch into an immemorial past, show that in 
their lives the hairy elephant of the north played the same 
part that his remote collateral descendant now plays in the 
lives of the savages who dwell under a vertical sun beside 
the tepid waters of the Nile and the Congo. 
In the first dawn of history, the sculptured records of 
the kings of Egypt, Babylon, and Nineveh show the immense 
importance which attached in the eyes of the mightiest 
monarchs of the then world to the chase and the trophies 
of this great strange beast. The ancient civilization of In¬ 
dia boasts as one of its achievements the taming of the ele¬ 
phant; and in the ancient lore of that civilization the 
elephant plays a distinguished part. 
The elephant is unique among the beasts of great bulk 
in the fact that his growth in size has been accompanied by 
growth in brain power. With other beasts growth in bulk 
of body has not been accompanied by similar growth of 
mind. Indeed sometimes there seems to have been mental 
retrogression. The rhinoceros, in several different forms, 
is found in the same regions as the elephant, and in one of 
its forms it is in point of size second only to the elephant 
among terrestrial animals. Seemingly the ancestors of the 
two creatures, in that period, separated from us by uncounted 
hundreds of thousands of years, which we may conven¬ 
iently designate as late miocene or early pliocene, were sub¬ 
stantially equal in brain development. But in one case 
increase in bulk seems to have induced lethargy and atrophy 
of brain power, while in the other case brain and body have 
both grown. At any rate the elephant is now one of the 
