THE ELEPHANT MYTH.

Akaroa Mail and Banks Peninsula Advertiser, Volume V, Issue 492, 1 April 1881, Page 2

THE ELEPHANT MYTH.

The elephant, of our childhood no longer exists. Like behemoth and leviathan and other mythical creatures in whom Aye once implicitly believed, he has been proved to be a figment of, . the Oriental imagination. "The authority upon" which Aye make this unwelcome announcement is no other than,Mr Sanderson, who has for many years filled the poßtof superintendent of elephants to! the Government of India, and Avho stands in the same relation to these animals that Sir Joseph Fayres occupies to tigers and ' venomous snakes. In a. lecture recently delivered to the" United States Institution at Simla, he roundly calls the i elephant ''positively i liotic in its attempts at escape when captured,' and talks of ;t its want of originab'ty and its positive .stupidity in many things." In short, 1 "in the faculty of reasoning it is far below the dog and other animals." Nor will Mr Sanderson allow the estimates of its great hight. Out of many hundreds, he has measured in southern India and Bengal. •he has not found onereachiug teii fe&kt'the shoulder. Yet one disillusion more; ,The elephant hunters in both Ceylon and "India corroborate Sinbad's story that ' elephants,_ when they feel the aproach of death, retire to a solitary and inaccessible valley and theri die in peace. But Mr Sanderson, though he admits that no man has come across the corpse of a vvild elephant that has died a natural death, attributes this rather to their extreme longevity,-which he is disposed to place as high as two hundred years. ;■ This explanation, however, seems to us to violate that rule of scientific hypothesis Avhich requires that the cause should be adequate to account for the result.