none for courtesy;
His legs are for necessity, not flexure"--

says Shakespeare. Even down to the last century did this notion
prevail, so little did people know of this animal. The supposition
that he slept leaning against a tree is to be traced in Thomson's
'Seasons'--

"Or where the Ganges rolls his sacred waves
Leans the huge elephant."

Again, Montgomery says--

"Beneath the palm which he was wont to make
His prop in slumber."

At a very early period elephants were used in war, not only by the
Indian but the African nations. In the first Punic war (B.C. 264-241)
they were used considerably by the Carthaginians, and in the second
Punic war Hannibal carried thirty-seven of them across the Alps. In
the wars of the Moghuls they were used extensively. The domestication
of the African elephant has now entirely ceased; there is however
no reason why this noble animal should not be made as useful as its
Indian brother; it is a bigger animal, and as tractable, judging from
the specimens in menageries. It was trained in the time of the Romans
for performances in the arena, and swelled the pomp of military
triumphs, when, as Macaulay, I think, in his 'Lays of Ancient Rome,'
says, the people wondered at--

"The monstrous beast that had
A serpent for a hand."

It seems a cruel shame, when one comes to think of it, that thousands
of these noble animals should perish annually by all sorts of ignoble
means--pitfalls, hamstringing, poisoned arrows, and a few here and
there shot with more or less daring by adventurous sportsmen, only
for the sake of their magnificent tusks.

Few people think, as they leisurely cut open the pages of a new book
or play with their ivory-handled dessert-knives after dinner, of the
life that has once been the lot of that inanimate substance, so
beautiful in its texture, so prized from time immemorial; still less
do they think, for the majority do not know, of the enormous loss
of life entailed in purveying this luxury for the market. An elephant
is a long-lived beast; it is difficult to say what is the extent of
its individual existence; at fifty years it is in its prime, and its
reproduction is in ratio slower than animals of shorter life, yet
what countless herds must there be in Central Africa when we consider
that the annual requirements of Sheffield alone are reported to be
upwards of 46,000 tusks, which represent 23,000 elephants a year for
the commerce of one