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TUSKS AND TUSKERS 
and upright upon its pillar-like legs. In other beasts 
there is a bend, or there are bends, in the limbs between 
their origin from the trunk and their implantation 
upon earth. The elephant is also the only living 
ungulate animal, except the hyrax, which has retained 
many toes. In other ungulates one or more have dis- 
appeared upon both hind and fore limbs. Its scanty 
covering of hair betrays the ungulate as does also the 
thick skin. The elephant is as pachydermatous as 
the rhinoceros. Though divested for the most part of 
a hairy covering, the newly born elephant is much more 
liberally provided with hair, a fact which recalls 
the mammoth of antiquity. That the trunk is an essen- 
tial of an elephant everyone knows, though it is not a 
matter of universal knowledge that this organ is merely 
the prolonged snout plus the upper lip. Hence it is 
not merely a long nose as caricaturists would some- 
times have us believe. The nostrils are at the end 
of this lithe trunk, which is also a tactile and prehensile 
organ of value to its possessor. The tusks are of course 
the principal cause of the commencing rarity of the 
elephant, particularly the African species. They are 
really great persistent incisor teeth, entirely com- 
parable to those of rodents, since they grow perpetu- 
ally through the life of the animal. The Chinese have 
a legend concerning the fossil ivory met with in nor- 
thern Asia, that the teeth are the remains of a gigantic 
and underground rat. The legend has so far a basis in 
truth that the long and persistently growing teeth of 
the two animals are the same kind of teeth. The two 
kinds of elephants are always to be seen at the Zoo. 
The notorious Jumbo and his helpmeet Alice were 
African elephants, which grow to rather a larger size, 
and are to a certain extent a more primitive type of 
elephant, than the Eastern form; they range from 
India through some of the larger islands of the Malay 
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