elephant
was gradually being exterminated in India; but this is not the case,
especially since the laws for their protection have come into force:
"The elephant-catching records of the past fifty years attest the
fact that there is no diminution in the numbers now obtainable in
Bengal, whilst in Southern India elephants have become so numerous
of late years that they are annually appearing where they had never
been heard of before."

He then instances the Billigarungun hills, an isolated range of three
hundred square miles on the borders of Mysore, where wild elephants
first made their appearance about eighty years ago, the country
having relapsed from cultivation into a wilderness owing to the
decimation of the inhabitants by three successive visitations of
small-pox. He adds: "The strict preservation of wild elephants seems
only advantageous or desirable in conjunction with corresponding
measures for keeping their numbers within bounds by capture. It is
to be presumed that elephants are preserved with a view to their
utilisation. With its jungles filled with elephants, the anomalous
state of things by which Government, when obliged to go into the
market, finds them barely procurable, and then only at prices double
those of twenty, and quadruple those of forty years ago, will I trust
be considered worthy of inquiry. Whilst it is necessary to maintain
stringent restrictions on the wasteful and cruel native modes of
hunting, it will I believe be found advantageous to allow lessees
every facility for hunting under conditions that shall insure humane
management of their captives. I believe that the price of elephants
might be reduced one-half in a year or two by such measures. The most
ordinary elephant cannot be bought at present for less than Rs. 2,000.
Unless something be done, it is certain that the rifle will have to
be called into requisition to protect the ryots of tracts bordering
upon elephant jungles. To give an idea of the numbers of wild
elephants in some parts of India, I may say that during the past three
years 503 elephants have been captured by the Dacca kheddah
establishment, in a tract of country forty miles long by twenty broad,
in the Garo hills, whilst not less than one thousand more were met
with during the hunting operations. Of course these elephants do not
confine themselves to that tract alone, but wander into other parts
of the hills. There are immense tracts of country in India similarly
well