The menageries : quadrupeds, described and drawn from living subjects.

Date:
1831
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The menageries : quadrupeds, described and drawn from living subjects. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    132/412 (page 122)
    12<2 the history of the refined nations of antiquity, when this destruction of the elephant was as great as in modern times :—when Africa yielded her tributes of elephants’ teeth to the kings of Persia*; when the people of Judaea built “ivory palacesf;” when the gallies of Tyre had “ benches of ivory \ when, con- tributing to the barbarous luxury of the early Grecian princes, “ The spoils of elephants the roofs inlay § when the Etruscan attributes of royalty were sceptres and thrones of ivory ||; when the ancient kings and magistrates of Rome sat in ivory seats ^; when colossal ivory statues of their g'ods, far exceed- ing, in their vast proportions and their splendid orna- ments, all the magnificence of the moderns, were raised by the Greeks of the age of Pericles; and when immense stores of ivory, to be employed with similar prodigality, were collected in the temples **. In the time of Pliny, the vast consumption of ivory for articles of luxury had compelled the Romans to seek for it in another hemisphere ; Africa had ceased to furnish elephants’ tusks, except of the smallest kind ft. A century or two earlier, according to Polybius, ivory was so plentiful in Africa, that the tribes on the confines of Ethiopia employed elephants’ tusks as door-posts, and for the palisades that en- closed their fields When the Roman power fell into decay, and the commerce of Europe with Africa was nearly suspended for centuries, the elephant was again unmolested in those regions. He was no * Herodotus, Thalia. Elephant’s teeth is the name in com- merce for what are more accurately called defenses or tusks—the substance of ivory. f Psalm xlv. 8. J Ezek. xxvii. 6. § Odyssey, lib. iv., v. 73. || Dionys. Halicar., iib. iii., cap. 18. ? Ibid,, lib. v., cap. iv. ** Cicero de Signis, par. 46. fp Hist. Nat., lib. viii., cap. 2. See Plin., lib. viii., cap. 10. ...