Progress of zoology. 
651 
possess them are exclusively males/"’* In Africa the hunger 
for meat and ivory causes the destruction of the elephant to 
an extent which threatens soon to extinguish the large-eared 
species altogether; but with neither of these incitements, it 
is perhaps being extinguished with still greater speed in 
Ceylon and India. There is a saving clause in the fact now 
established, that elephants will breed in captivity, but against 
it must be set the fact that in captivity it does not pay for 
its keep, and is scarcely worth the attention of those who 
employ it either for burden or draught. The elephant has 
too much character, too high a reasoning faculty, to be per¬ 
fect as a servant; it has too many whims, too many eccen¬ 
tricities of temper, and consumes far more food than it earns 
in harness. Thus, economically regarded, everything is 
against its preservation, and when the wild herds disappear 
there will probably remain but few in a domesticated state, 
for unlike the horse, ox, ass, and sheep, it is both unprofit¬ 
able and unmanageable. 
Zoology has been somewhat restricted in aim, spite of its 
own breadth as a science and the liberality of its leading 
cultivators. It owes most of its advance in recent times in 
the absorption into its circle of the facts of past biological 
history, to Professor Owen, whose ‘ Palaeontology ’ is a sort 
of panorama of extinct forms, placed side by side with their 
existing congeners and representatives. Australia and New 
Zealand have not only furnished innumerable subjects of 
anomalous kinds for the consideration .of system makers, but 
they have opened the way for rays of light to fall on the 
present direct from the past, by their illustrations of geo¬ 
logical eras. Nothing more strikingly exemplifies the re¬ 
lationship that subsists between all departments of know¬ 
ledge than the aid which zoology and geology respectively 
offer to each other. The existing fauna of Ceylon, as 
analysed by Sir Emerson Tennent, affords very satisfactory 
indications that the island is, in no geological or zoological 
sense, an outlier of the vast Indian continent, but a site, sui 
generis , like Australia, detached not only in its geography 
from the neighbouring continent, but in its chronology also, 
and in all its organic productions. On the other hand, 
geology does more than whisper of the connection that once 
subsisted between England and the continent of Europe by 
wav of the straits of Dover, for it furnishes all the evidence 
requisite to establish the conclusion that the separation was 
* ‘Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon, with Narratives and 
Anecdotes/ &c. &c. By Sir J. Emerson Tennent, K.C.B., LL.D., &c. 
Longmans and Co. 
