, having heard that she would like to have it, an
elephant which had been brought from the "Indies" and landed at
Dieppe. He declared it to be the first which had ever come into
France, but presented it to Her Majesty "as I would most willingly
present anything more excellent did I possess it." Thenceforward
elephants were from time to time exhibited at the Tower, together with
lions and other strange beasts acquired by the Crown.

None of these elephants were, however, "the first who ever burst" into
remote Britain after the mammoths had disappeared, and we were
separated from Europe by the geological changes which gave us the
English Channel--La Manche. Though Julius Caesar himself does not
mention it, it is definitely stated by a writer on strategy named
Polyaenus, a friend of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, but not, I am sorry
to say, an authority to whose statements historians attach any serious
value--that Caesar made use of an elephant armed with iron plates and
carrying on its back a tower full of armed men to terrify the ancient
Britons when he crossed the Thames--an operation which he carried out,
I believe, somewhere between Molesey and Staines.

Elephants are often spoken of as "Ungulates," and classed by
naturalists with the hoofed animals (the odd toed tapirs,
rhinoceroses, and horses, and the even-toed pigs, camel, cattle, and
deer). But there is not much to say in defence of such an association.
The elephants have, as a matter of fact, not got hoofs, and they have
five toes on each foot. The five toes of the front foot have each a
nail, whilst usually only four toes of the hind foot have nails. A
speciality of the elephant is the great circular pad of thick skin
overlying fat and fibrous tissue, which forms the sole of the foot and
bears the animal's enormous weight. This buffer-like development of
the foot existed in some great extinct mammals (the Dinoceras family,
of North America), but is altogether different from the support given
by a horse's hoof or the paired shoe-like hoofs of great cattle or
the three rather elegant hoofed toes of the rhinoceros.

The Indian elephant likes good, solid ground to walk on, and when he
finds himself in a boggy place will seize any large objects
(preferably big branches of trees) and throw them under his feet to
prevent himself sinking in. Occasionally he will remove the stranger
who is riding on his back and make use of him in this way. The
circumference of the Afr