CHAPTER V.
ANIMAL LIFE IN THE TROPICAL FORESTS:--THE ELEPHANT--THE RHINOCEROS.
Some thousands of years ago--no long period in the history of creation, though so far outstripping the written records of man--gigantic animals, with huge trunks and ivory tusks, forming the family of Proboscideæ, were distributed throughout all the northern regions of Europe, Asia, and America.
Of this family the most ancient and colossal representative is the _Dinotherium_, which appears to have flourished in the Miocene period of the Tertiary epoch, and a skull of which was disinterred at Eppelsheim, in Hesse Darmstadt, in 1836, measuring about four feet in length and three in breadth; whence Cuvier inferred that the total length of the animal was probably eighteen feet. This pachyderm, which far surpassed in size the largest living elephant, had a comparatively short trunk, and tusks inserted in front of the lower jaw. Such a lower jaw could hardly have been otherwise than cumbrous and inconvenient to the quadruped if he lived on land. No such disadvantage, as Dr. Buckland remarks,[171] would have attended this structure in a large animal destined to live in water; and the aquatic habits of the family of Tapirs, to which the Dinotherium was most nearly allied, render it probable that, like them, it was an inhabitant of fresh-water lakes and rivers.
Two other kinds of Proboscidians, the _Mastodon_ and the _Mammoth_, belong to the Pleiocene period, the last of the Tertiary epoch, and to the Intermediate or Glacial deposits, which immediately preceded the modern epoch. The Mastodon only differed essentially from the Elephant in his dental apparatus. His molar teeth were covered with conical projections, whence his name; he had two small tusks, planted in the lower jaw like those of the Dinotherium, but bent forward, and two others in the upper jaw, having the same direction, but being of a prodigious length. Buffon named it the "Animal of the Ohio," because its fossil remains were discovered on the banks of that great river. They have also been found in other parts of North America, and particularly in the saline morass known as Big-bone Lick, in the northern districts of Kentucky. Several skeletons, almost perfect, have been excavated at a moderate depth, and some of them in a vertical position, as if the animals had been stricken with death while standing, and suddenly engulfed in the mud.
Many curious fables are told by the Indians in reference to this extinct quadruped. The Shawnee Indians believe that contemporary with them lived a race of men of proportionate dimensions, and that the Great Being destroyed both the one and the other with thunderbolts. Those of Virginia state that the "Great Man on High" slew this colossal genus, because it was exterminating the animals created for the use of man, and that none escaped but the hugest bull, who, having been wounded by the celestial bolts, fled towards the great lakes, in whose solitudes he wanders to this very day. The Indians of Canada and Louisiana designate the Mastodon by the name of "Father of the Bulls," probably on account of the bones of cattle disinterred with his own.
The Mammoth (_Elephas primigenius_) is known to us only by the fossil remains which have been discovered embedded in the glacial deposits of the Intermediate epoch. The first discovery took place in 1799, under circumstances which are thus recorded in the _Zoologist_.
In 1799, a Tungusian fisherman observed, in a bank on the shore of the Frozen Ocean, at the mouth of the river Lena, a shapeless mass almost enveloped in ice, and he was quite unable to determine what it might be. In the following year a larger portion of this mass became visible, but the fisherman was still unable to discover its nature. Towards the end of the following summer, however, one of the tusks and an entire side of a fossilized animal were exposed. But it was not until the fifth year from its discovery, when the ice had melted sooner than usual, that the enormous animal became entirely detached from the bank or cliff in which it was first observed, and came thundering down upon a sand-bank below. In the month of March 1804, the fisherman extracted the tusks, which were nine feet six inches long, and together weighed 360 pounds, and sold them at Yakoutsk for fifty roubles. Two years afterwards, Mr. Adams, a traveller, visited the animal, and found it much mutilated. The Yakoutes residing in the neighbourhood had cut away the flesh to feed their dogs; wild beasts had also eaten a great quantity of it. Nevertheless, with the exception of a fore-leg, the skeleton was entire; the other bones being still held together by ligaments and portions of skin. The head was covered with dried skin; one of the ears was entire, and furnished with a tuft of hairs; the pupil of the eye was still to be distinguished; the brain was in the skull, but somewhat dried; the lower lip had been gnawed by animals, the upper one was entirely gone, and the teeth were consequently exposed; the neck was furnished with a long mane; the skin was covered with long hair and a reddish wool; the portion of skin still remaining was so heavy that two men could scarcely carry it; according to Mr. Adams, more than thirty pounds' weight of hair and wool was collected from the wet sand into which it had been trodden by the white bears while devouring the flesh. This skeleton is now preserved in the Museum of the Academy of St. Petersburg. The height of the creature is about nine feet, and its extreme length to the tip of the tail about sixteen feet.
A second carcass was afterwards discovered on the bank of the Asaleïa, which empties its waters into the Frozen Sea, by the traveller Sarytcheff. It was standing upright, and wholly covered with its skin and fur. Finally, a third has been recently found in the same region, and the Museum at Paris possesses a portion of its skin, with a tuft of wool, and some relics of the mane.
The Mammoth, therefore, would seem to be a link connecting the past and the present worlds, a being whose body has outlived its destination. Evidently it was adapted to brave the winters of a boreal clime; its long, warm, and woolly coat forming an admirable defence against the severest cold. It probably inhabited the icy plains, and the banks of the lakes and rivers; its food consisting of lichens, reeds, and the young shoots of the willows and other trees which thrive in moist situations.
The Mammoth naturally leads us to an examination of his descendant and congener, the Elephant; the largest and strongest, the most sagacious and docile of all living animals.
Elephants, of which only two species at present exist, the Asiatic and African, are natives of tropical regions, where they prefer to inhabit the depths of the forests, quitting their umbrageous recesses only at night, in search of food, or to quench their thirst in the nearest stream.
The whole form of the animal suggests the idea of unwieldy strength. His head is large, with extremely small eyes, and very large and pendulous ears; he has an arched back, and a huge thick body, which rests upon clumsy and shapeless legs; his feet are slightly divided into five rounded heaps; the upper jaw is armed with two enormous projecting tusks, which measure in many instances six or seven feet; and he is endowed with an extraordinary proboscis or trunk, of such strength that it can uproot trees, and of such delicacy that it can gather grass. This organ, nearly eight feet in length, conveys the food to the mouth, and pumps up the enormous draughts of water, which by its recurvature are turned into and driven down the capacious throat, or showered over the body. Its length supplies the place of a long neck, which would have been incompatible with the support of the large head and weighty tusks. A glance at the head will show the thickness and strength of the trunk at its insertion; and the massy arched bones of the face and thick masculine neck, are wonderfully adapted for supporting and working this powerful and marvellous instrument.
The Asiatic Elephant (_Elephas maximus_ of Linné, _Elephas Indicus_ of Cuvier) has small ears and tusks. A head elongated in height, and terminating in a kind of double pyramid. His hide is a clear brown colour. This species includes several varieties; that of Indo-China is remarkable for its prodigious height, which sometimes attains fifteen feet, and for a skin marked with brown spots upon a clear gray ground. The islands of the Indian Archipelago likewise contain several varieties of elephants, which experts can easily distinguish from one another. In every species are found the _albinos_, or white elephants, which receive the marked veneration of every Indian race, and particularly of those of Siam and Pegu.
The African Elephant (_Elephas Africanus_) differs from the preceding in the structure of his grinder teeth, in the length of his tusks, which are enormous, and in his ears, whose trumpet is also of great dimensions. He was formerly met with throughout all the African continent, and was much employed in war by the Carthaginians and Egyptians. From the northern regions of Africa he has now disappeared, but large herds still haunt the whole southern division, from the Senegal to the Cape, and the eastern districts, as far north as Abyssinia. He is also found in all the African interior, whose inhabitants deal in ivory as the staple of their commerce. His height is equal to that of the Asiatic elephant, and the habits of the two species are identical.
Elephants live in the forests, gathering in troops of from thirty to about one hundred individuals, and as they require a very extensive area of pasturage, it is said that they pitilessly expel from their domains all other animals which trespass therein to share the product.
Each herd marches under the guidance of an acknowledged chief. When they sally forth from their retreats to devastate a field, or to wander in quest of fresh pastures, they observe a very regular order of march; the young and the females occupying the centre, the males assemble round them in a circle. If danger threatens, the little ones take refuge under the breast of their mothers, who fold their trunks about them.
The young elephant is suckled for two years, and during that period attains the stature of four feet and a half. At the end of the third year he is nearly six feet high. He continues to grow, but less rapidly, until twenty-two or twenty-four years old. The female adults measure generally from seven to nine feet in height, and the males from ten feet and a half to twelve. As may be inferred from the tardiness of his growth, the elephant enjoys the privilege of longevity. He has been known to live in captivity to the age of 120 or 130 years; but Cuvier was of opinion that in his free and wild condition he might well number nearly a couple of centuries.
The Africans hunt the elephant for the sake of his ivory and flesh; in India, and the isles of the Indian Ocean, to reduce them to subjection. In Africa, for many negro populations, ivory and "ebony wood" (an euphuism by which the slave-dealers designate their black slaves) are the sole articles of commerce, and the majority of the English, Dutch, and French colonists carry on a considerable traffic in elephants' teeth. The negroes excavate wide pits which they cover over with branches; and the elephants falling into them are precipitated headlong upon sharpened stakes; or they kill them either with arrows, assegays, or musketry. Hunting them with spears is truly a ferocious pastime. The poor elephant only succumbs after receiving so great a number of projectiles that his body resembles an enormous porcupine. He rarely turns upon his aggressors; he seeks to fly; he fills the air with plaintive wailings; the female throws her huge bulk between her young ones and the enemy; the male sometimes rushes furiously upon his assailants, and woe to the latter if he overtake them; he crushes them under his hoofs, he pierces them with his tusks, or seizes them with his trunk, and dashes them upon the earth a shapeless and bleeding mass. But nimble and experienced hunters easily elude his charge, whose onset he is prevented from moderating by his weight, or from rapidly changing its direction.
But firearms, and especially the recently perfected rifles, are assuredly the best weapons to employ against the leviathan. With a Westley-Richards, for instance, a good marksman, aiming at the shoulder-joint or the ear, is certain to bring down his game; he may post himself at a distance, and avoid exposure, while the victim is saved from a cruel agony.
Ivory is not the only valuable product which the elephant yields; his hide, very thick and very tenacious, can be utilized for many purposes. The bucklers made of it by the negroes are scarcely less precious than the shield of Ajax, which was formed of a bull's hide sevenfold. The animal's flesh is also eaten, although too tough and too strongly flavoured for an European palate.
In India and the Indian islands the chase is carried on to make prisoners, and not victims. Its most remarkable feature is the important and almost indispensable assistance which the tame elephants render man against their wild brethren, zealously aiding to reduce them into slavery; now serving as baits to beguile and attract, and now as gendarmes, or rather as convict-warders, to compel their obedience. In Ceylon, elephant-hunting is almost an affair of State; it is like a national war, in which the Government appeals to the goodwill of the population generally, both Europeans and natives.
As soon as it is known that a troop or _horde_ of elephants has assembled in a forest, the natives set to work, and with trunks of trees fixed in the ground and supported by transversal bars and buttresses, construct a vast palisaded enclosure, or _corral_, whose entrance forms a kind of gullet so narrow that the animals can only enter one by one, and once drawn into it are unable to return. This being accomplished, a thousand men, Europeans or Cingalese, surround the forest; they enclose the herd in a circle which incessantly contracts, and drive them before them by waving their torches, and keeping up a grand _tintamarre_ of tamtams, trumpets, and musket-shots. The frightened animals can find no other avenue of escape than the entrance to the corral, where are placed, moreover, as an attraction, some females trained to act as decoys.
When all, or nearly all the herd, has been driven into the enclosure, the entrance is strongly and firmly closed with ropes and beams. The elephants, perceiving themselves caught in a trap, naturally endeavour to effect their escape by the way they entered. A sufficient number of hunters then place themselves along each side of the avenue, and a few, mounted on the decoys, are stationed at its extremity. The moment that one of the captives has got entangled in it, his retreat is cut off by means of thick planks piled across the palisade, and he is allowed to make his way towards the entrance, which is also blocked up. There he encounters the decoys, which force him, by striking him with their trunks, to fall back against a neighbouring tree, to which he is speedily bound with ropes. This first operation accomplished, the females are led back to the corral, and the game is renewed, until all the animals have undergone the same fate, and each of them is thralled to a tree in the forest. Nothing now remains but to accustom them to a life of servitude; and this is done by depriving them of food for a short time, then administering it in small quantities, and proceeding from the articles they like the least to those they prize the most. The privation at first enfeebles them, and consequently calms their irritation, while they feel the greater gratitude afterwards for the alleviation which is so readily afforded them. This gratitude, and, still more, the dependance in which they find themselves upon man, who at his supreme pleasure grants or refuses their food, renders them in a few days docile and tractable. Thus their docility, and the important services which they render, mainly arise in the overmastering fear which man inspires in them.
"It is remarkable," says Boitard, "that the elephant is not and never has been a domestic animal, but a captive who only obeys through terror. However tame he may be, he never fails to escape into the woods to resume his savage life if an opportunity arises. The need, therefore, arises that on a long march he shall have his driver, or _mahoud_, on his back, to guide him, threaten him, and prevent him from taking to flight. His love of liberty is as great as that of the wildest animals, and in the female elephants it even overpowers maternal love; therefore, when suckling their young, they are never released from their chains, for experience has proved that they will abandon them without regret if circumstances should enable them to effect their escape."
The moral and intellectual qualities of the elephant have been greatly exaggerated. As far as his morality is concerned, we must pronounce him a cowardly, pettish, and rancorous animal, which retains a much livelier recollection of every injury done him than of the benefits he may have received. In an intellectual point of view he is certainly inferior to the ape and the dog, but he is superior to the Carnaria, as well as to most of the Herbivora. His faculties, perhaps, may be most justly compared to those of the horse, which would certainly have exhibited as much intelligence if Nature had gifted him with a trunk; for we must never forget that the development of an animal's faculties greatly depends upon the perfection of his organs. Again, the horse is susceptible of a complete domestication, while the elephant, as Boitard has remarked, is a captive, ever dreading, never loving his master, and eagerly awaiting a favourable moment to escape from him.
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After the Elephant, the chief of the animals inhabiting the forests is the Rhinoceros, ranged with him by Linné in the order of _Belluæ_ (or enormous beasts), by Cuvier in that of Pachyderms, and by De Blainville in that of Gravigrades.
The name _Rhinoceros_ ([Greek: rhin], nose, and [Greek: keras], horn) indicates at once the peculiarity which at the first glance distinguishes him from the other Pachyderms. He carries, in fact, upon the arch formed by his nasal bones one or two solid, curved, and sharp-pointed horns, which serve him as very formidable weapons. His ears are upright, pointed, and moderately large; the eyes small and half closed. The coarse thick skin, knotty or granulated on its surface, is of such tenacity and impenetrability about the short thick legs and ungainly body, that it resists the claws of the lion or the tiger, the sword or the shot of the hunter. It hangs about the neck in several large plaits or folds; another fold passes from the shoulders to the fore-legs, and another from the hind part of the back to the thighs. He has a moderately large and long head, a protruding upper lip, and a depressed skull. His manners are fierce, but not aggressive; he leads a lethargic life, and wallows on the marshy banks of lakes and rivers, where grows the vegetable food on which he exclusively feeds. He usually measures about twelve feet in length from the tip of the nose to the insertion of the tail; his height is about seven feet; and the girth of his body is nearly equal to its length!
The appearance of the Rhinoceros upon the globe was probably contemporaneous with that of the Proboscideæ. Fossil remains of the animal have been discovered in the temperate, and even the cold countries of Asia and Europe. In 1772 an entire rhinoceros, admirably preserved, was found embedded on the banks of a Siberian river, in the ancient frozen soil. Now-a-days he is exclusively confined to the tropical regions of the Old World. He lives a solitary life in the dense jungles of India, the Sunda Islands, Central and Austral Africa. Naturalists distinguish six varieties--the Rhinoceros of India, the one-horned Rhinoceros of Java, the two-horned Rhinoceros of Sumatra, the unarmed Rhinoceros, the two-horned Rhinoceros of Africa, and the Rhinoceros of Bruce.
The Indian Rhinoceros attains the height of five to six feet, and the length of seven to nine feet. He confines his wanderings in the main to the Trans-Gangetic peninsula. He has but one horn, and some dim tradition of this animal may probably have suggested the long popular fable of the mysterious Unicorn. His skin, of a dusky brown, is so singularly thick that it would have rendered all movement impossible on the part of the quadruped, if Nature had not disposed it in deep folds corresponding to the principal articulations. Thus he seems to the eye caparisoned in a body-armour of thick leather, formed in several pieces; and in truth his impervious hide constitutes a cuirass against which even musket-balls strike innocuously. Hence he dreads not the attacks of any of the Carnivora.
The Rhinoceros of Java is undoubtedly but a variety of the Indian species. That of Sumatra differs from the preceding in the possession of two horns--one, the anterior, of great length; the other, much shorter. His skin is moderately thick, very much wrinkled, in deep folds, and garnished with a quantity of long hair.
The unarmed Rhinoceros, who inhabits the islands of the Ganges, has but one rudimentary horn.
The African Rhinoceros is the king of his race. He wears a naked, smooth, and tenacious skin. Two horns are mounted on his upper jaw; the front one measures more than eighteen inches in length. In all Southern and Western Africa this huge ungainly quadruped is found.
The Rhinoceros of Bruce inhabits Abyssinia. His supreme idea of happiness, of the _summum bonum_, as viewed from a _Proboscidean_ point of view, is to wallow luxuriously in the mud and slime, and while abandoning himself to this anti-Sybaritic indulgence, he heaves a hoarse groan of satisfaction, which conducts the hunter to his retreat. The Abyssinians pursue him on horseback. Some attack him with arrows or with musketry; others, and these are the boldest, leap from their steeds at the moment the rhinoceros leaps upon him, and hamstring him with their sabres. The huge quadruped falls immediately, and becomes an easy prey to his aggressors.[172] In South Africa the Kaffirs and the Hottentots display an equal audacity in attacking this formidable foe. They dare to confront him with their sharp knives alone, and generally with success, though a weak thrust or a wrong aim would entail upon them a sudden, swift, and terrible death.
Mr. Cooper Rose, in his "Sketch of South Africa," celebrates an aged chief who had won a well-deserved renown by the most extraordinary instance of courage and presence of mind. He was out a-hunting. A rhinoceros broke abruptly from the covert of a dense thicket, and so near to him, that the Kaffir easily leaped upon his back. The furious animal immediately dashed through the jungle, beat the earth with his horn, roared with rage, and used his utmost exertions to dismount his unwelcome rider. In this he would have undoubtedly succeeded, and the negro must have perished, if happily the kross, or sheepskin mantle of the latter, had not been caught in the bushes. Mad with fury, the rhinoceros threw himself upon it, and while he was busy rending it in fragments the Kaffir leaped lightly to the ground, and saved himself in the deep recesses of the forest.