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  THE
  WILD ELEPHANT.

  LONDON
  PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO.
  NEW-STREET SQUARE


[Illustration: AN ELEPHANT CORRAL.]




  THE
  WILD ELEPHANT
  AND
  _THE METHOD OF CAPTURING
  AND TAMING IT IN
  CEYLON_.

  BY
  SIR J. EMERSON TENNENT, BART.
  K.C.S. LL.D. F.R.S. &c.

  AUTHOR OF “CEYLON, AN ACCOUNT OF THE ISLAND,
  PHYSICAL, HISTORICAL, AND TOPOGRAPHICAL,”
  ETC.

  LONDON:
  LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
  1867.


  _TO_
  MY INTELLIGENT COMPANION

  IN MANY OF THE JOURNEYS THROUGHOUT THE MOUNTAINS AND
  FORESTS OF CEYLON, IN THE COURSE OF WHICH MUCH
  OF THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS
  VOLUME WAS COLLECTED;
  _TO_
  MAJOR SKINNER,
  CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF ROADS AND PUBLIC WORKS,
  ETC., ETC.
  ONE OF THE MOST EXPERIENCED AND VALUABLE SERVANTS OF
  THE CROWN;
  IT IS INSCRIBED,
  IN THE HOPE THAT IT MAY RECALL TO HIM THE
  PLEASANT MEMORIES WHICH IT
  AWAKES IN ME.




PREFACE.


In this volume, the chapters descriptive of the structure and habits
of the wild elephant are reprinted for the sixth time from a larger
work,[1] published originally in 1859. Since the appearance of the
First Edition, many corrections and much additional matter have been
supplied to me, chiefly from India and Ceylon, and will be found
embodied in the following pages.

To one of these in particular I feel bound to direct attention. In the
course of a more enlarged essay on the zoology of Ceylon,[2] amongst
other proofs of a geological origin for that island, distinct from
that of the adjacent continent of India, as evidenced by peculiarities
in the flora and fauna of each respectively, I had occasion to advert
to a discovery which had been recently announced by Temminck in
his _Survey of the Dutch possessions in the Indian Archipelago_,[3]
that the elephant which abounds in Sumatra (although unknown in the
adjacent island of Java), and which had theretofore been regarded as
identical in species with the Indian one, has been found to possess
peculiarities, in which it differs as much from the elephant of India
as the latter does from its African congener. On this new species, to
which the natives give the name of “_gadjah_,” TEMMINCK has conferred
the scientific designation of the _Elephas Sumatranus_. The points
which entitle it to this distinction he enumerates minutely in the
work[4] before alluded to, and they have been summarized as follows by
Prince Lucien Bonaparte.

“This species is perfectly intermediate between the Indian and African,
especially in the shape of the skull, and will certainly put an end to
the distinction between _Elephas_ and _Loxodon_, with those who admit
that anatomical genus; since although the crowns of the teeth of _E.
Sumatranus_ are more like the Asiatic animal, still the less numerous
undulated ribbons of enamel are nearly quite as wide as those forming
the lozenges of the African. The number of pairs of false ribs (which
alone vary, the true ones being always six) is fourteen, one less
than in the _Africanus_, _one_ more than in the _Indicus_; and so
it is with the dorsal vertebræ, which are twenty in the _Sumatranus_
(_twenty-one_ and _nineteen_ in the others), whilst the new species
agrees with _Africanus_ in the number of sacral vertebræ (_four_), and
with _Indicus_ in that of the caudal ones, which are _thirty-four_.”[5]


Professor SCHLEGEL of Leyden, in a paper lately submitted by him to
the Royal Academy of Sciences of Holland, (the substance of which he
obligingly communicated to me, through Baron Bentinck the Netherlands
Minister at this Court), confirmed the identity of the Ceylon
elephant with that found in the Lampongs of Sumatra. The osteological
comparison of which TEMMINCK has given the results was, he says,
conducted by himself with access to four skeletons of the latter; and
the more recent