The Menageries - v. 2 Author:James Rennie Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Chapter V. THE AFRICAN ELEPHANT. ELEPHANT HUNTS. African Elephant. Elephas Africanus. Cuviek. Before the settlements of the Portuguese on the coasts of ... more »Africa, in the latter part of the fifteenth century, the elephant ranged without much interrup- From an elephant in the Menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes, 1829. tion, on the banks of the great rivers, whose courses, even at our own days, have not been completely traced. In the plains of the kingdom of Congo, where the herbage attains a wild luxuriance amidst innumerable lakes, and on the borders of the Senegal, whose waters run through extensive forests, herds of elephants had wandered for ages in security. The poor African, mdeed, occasionally destroyed a few stragglers, to obtain a rare and luxurious feast of the more delicate parts of their flesh; and the desire for ornament, which prevails even in the rudest forms of savage life, rendered the chiefs of the native hordes anxious to possess the tusk of the elephant, to convert it into armlets and other fanciful embellishments of their persons. Superstition, too, occasionally prompted the destruction of this powerful animal; for the tail of the elephant had become an object of reverence, and therefore of distinction to its possessor: and the huntsman, accordingly, devoted himself, with as much ferocity as the hyaena-dog that gnaws off the tail of the ox and the sheep during their unprotected repose, to steal upon the unsuspecting elephant in his pasture, and to cut off his tail with a single stroke of his rugged hatchet f. But these were irregular and partial incentives to the destruction of the most mighty, and, at the same time, the most peaceful inhabitant of the woods. The steady and inexorable demands of commerce had not yet come to the shores of Africa, to ...« less