has served to establish other though minor points of
divergence. The Indian species is more robust and powerful: the
proboscis longer and more slender; and the extremity, (a point, in which
the elephant of Sumatra resembles that of Africa,) is more flattened and
provided with coarser and longer hair than that of India.

PROFESSOR SCHLEGEL, adverting to the large export of elephants from
Ceylon to the Indian continent, which has been carried on from time
immemorial, suggests the caution with which naturalists, in
investigating this question, should first satisfy themselves whether the
elephants they examine are really natives of the mainland, or whether
they have been brought to it from the islands.[1] "The extraordinary
fact," he observes in his letter to me, "of the identity thus
established between the elephants of Ceylon and Sumatra; and the points
in which they are found to differ from that of Bengal, leads to the
question whether all the elephants of the Asiatic continent belong to
one single species; or whether these vast regions may not produce in
some quarter as yet unexplored the one hitherto found only in the two
islands referred to? It is highly desirable that naturalists who have
the means and opportunity, should exert themselves to discover, whether
any traces are to be found of the Ceylon elephant in the Dekkan; or of
that of Sumatra in Cochin China or Siam."

[Footnote 1: A further inquiry suggests itself, how far the intermixture
of the breed may have served to confound specific differences, in the
case of elephants bred on the continent of India, from stock partially
imported from Ceylon?]

To me the establishment of a fact so conclusively confirmatory of the
theory I had ventured to broach, is productive of great satisfaction.
But it is not a little remarkable that the distinction should not long
before have been discovered between the elephant of India and that of
Ceylon. Nor can it be regarded otherwise than as a singular illustration
of "geographical distribution" that two remote islands should be thus
shown to possess in common a species unknown in any other quarter of the
globe. As bearing on the ancient myth which represents both countries as
forming parts of a submerged continent, the discovery is curious--and it
is equally interesting in connection with the circumstance alluded to by
Gibbon, that amongst the early geographers and even down to a
comparatively modern date, Sumatra and Ceylon w