234 ELEPHANT-HUNTING [ch. x 
migrations that are sometimes seasonal, and sometimes 
irregular and unaccountable. 
No other animal, not the lion himself, is so constant 
a theme of talk, and a subject of such unflagging interest 
round the camp-fires of African hunters and in the 
native villages of the African wilderness, as the elephant. 
Indeed, the elephant has always profoundly impressed 
the imagination of mankind. It is, not only to hunters, 
but to naturalists, and to all people who possess any 
curiosity about wild creatures and the wild life of 
nature, the most interesting of all animals. Its huge 
bulk, its singular form, the value of its ivory, its great 
intelligence—in which it is only matched, if at all, by 
the highest apes, and possibly by one or two of the 
highest carnivores—and its varied habits, all combine to 
give it an interest such as attaches to no other living 
creature below the rank of man. In line of descent and 
in physical formation it stands by itself, wholly apart 
from all the other great land beasts, and differing from 
them even more widely than they differ from one 
another. The two existing species—the African, which 
is the larger and finer animal, and the Asiatic—differ 
from one another as much as they do from the mam¬ 
moth and similar extinct forms which were the contem¬ 
poraries of early man in Europe and North America. 
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 
