will annoy and irritate him by their audacity in
making free with his provender; but this is an evidence in itself of the
little instinctive dread which such comparatively puny creatures
entertain of one so powerful and yet so gentle.

Amongst elephants themselves, jealousy and other causes of irritation
frequently occasion contentions between individuals of the same herd;
but on such occasions it is their habit to strike with their trunks, and
to bear down their opponents with their heads. It is doubtless correct
that an elephant, when prostrated by the force and fury of an antagonist
of its own species, is often wounded by the downward pressure of the
tusks, which in any other position it would be almost impossible to use
offensively.[1]

[Footnote 1: A writer in the _India Sporting Review_ for October 1857
says a male elephant was killed by two others close to his camp: "the
head was completely smashed in; there was a large hole in the side, and
the abdomen was ripped open. The latter wound was given probably after
it had fallen."--P. 175.]

Mr. Mercer, who in 1846 was the principal civil officer of Government at
Badulla, sent me a jagged fragment of an elephant's tusk, about five
inches in diameter, and weighing between twenty and thirty pounds, which
had been brought to him by some natives, who, being attracted by a noise
in the jungle, witnessed a combat between a tusker and one without
tusks, and saw the latter with his trunk seize one of the tusks of his
antagonist and wrench from it the portion in question, which measured
two feet in length.

Here the trunk was shown to be the more powerful offensive weapon of the
two; but I apprehend that the chief reliance of the elephant for defence
is on its ponderous weight, the pressure of its foot being sufficient to
crush any minor assailant after being prostrated by means of its trunk.
Besides, in using its feet for this purpose, it derives a wonderful
facility from the peculiar formation of the knee-joint in the hind leg,
which, enabling it to swing the hind feet forward close to the ground,
assists it to toss the body alternately from foot to foot, till deprived
of life.[1]

[Footnote 1: In the Third Book of Maccabees, which is not printed in our
Apocrypha, but appears in the series in the Greek Septuagint, the
author, in describing the persecution of the Jews by Ptolemy Philopater,
B.C. 210, states that the king swore vehemently that he would send them
into t