654 
African Game Trails 
wilderness, as the elephant. Indeed the ele¬ 
phant 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 creat¬ 
ures and the wild life of nature, the most in¬ 
teresting 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 contemporaries of early man in Europe 
and North America. The carvings of our 
palaeolithic forefathers, etched on bone by 
cavern dwellers, from whom we are sun¬ 
dered by ages which stretch into an imme¬ 
morial 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 sculpt¬ 
ured records of the kings of Egypt, Baby¬ 
lon, and Nineveh show the immense im¬ 
portance 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 India 
boasts as one of its achievements the taming 
of the elephant; and in the ancient lore of 
that civilization the elephant plays a dis¬ 
tinguished 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 retrogres¬ 
sion. 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 pe¬ 
riod, separated from us by uncounted hun¬ 
dreds of thousands of years, which we may 
conveniently designate as late miocene or 
early pliocene, were substantially equal in 
brain development. But in one case in¬ 
crease in bulk seems to have induced leth¬ 
argy 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 wisest, and the rhinoceros one of 
the stupidest of big mammals. In conse¬ 
quence the elephant outlasts the rhino, 
although he is the largest, carries infinite¬ 
ly more valuable spoils, and is far more 
eagerly and persistently hunted. Both ani¬ 
mals wandered freely over the open country 
of East Africa thirty years ago. But the 
elephant learns by experience infinitely 
more readily than the rhinoceros. The 
former no longer lies in the open plains, 
and now even crosses them if possible at 
night. But those rhinoceros which former¬ 
ly dwelt in the plains for the most part con¬ 
tinue to dwell there until killed out. Not 
the most foolish elephant would under sim¬ 
ilar conditions behave as the rhinos that 
we studied and hunted by Kilimakin and 
in the Sotik behaved. No elephant, in 
regions which have been hunted, would 
habitually spend its days lying or standing 
in the open plain; nor would it, in such 
places, repeatedly, and in fact uniformly, 
permit men to walk boldly up to it without 
heeding them until in its immediate neigh¬ 
borhood. The elephant’s sight is bad, as 
is that of the rhinoceros; but a very brief 
experience with rifle-bearing man makes 
the former take refuge in regions where 
scent and hearing count for more than 
sight; while no experience has any such 
effect on the rhino. The rhinos that now 
live in the bush are the descendants of those 
which always lived in the bush; and it is in 
the bush that the species will linger long 
after it has vanished from the open, and it is 
in the bush that it is most formidable. 
Elephant and rhino differ as much in 
their habits as in their intelligence. The 
former is very gregarious, herds of several 
hundred being sometimes found, and is of 
a restless, wandering temper, often shifting 
his abode and sometimes making long 
migrations. The rhinoceros is a lover of 
solitude; it is usually found alone, or a 
