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.

    34/412 (page 24)
    range about a large enclosure ; and they have a bath which they enjoy with infinite delight in warm weather. We saw, in 1825, the large male (who is since dead) up to his middle in a pool, in a hot day in August, spouting the water from his trunk with scarcely less joy than he would feel in his native woods. When his bath was finished, he would stand quietly for a little time in the sun;—and then, gathering a quantity of dust in his trunk, blow it over his back till the crevices in his skin were suffi- ciently covered to be protected against the flies. The close confinement of the elephant has doubt- less a tendency to aggravate those periodical fits of rage to which the males are subject; and, more- over, these fits are much more fearful when the animal is pent up in a narrow cage. The pieces of oak which formed the bars of Chuni’s cage were eight or ten inches square,—and yet he snapped them like matches. The elephants of India which are em- ployed in domestic purposes, although subject to these fits, are rarely obliged to be destroyed. They are confined in a secure place till the effect is passed off. Again, elephants in the miserable cages of our menageries are liable not only to accidents, but to diseases which prevent them reaching the great age which is peculiar to this quadruped. The elephant of Louis XIV., which died at Versailles when he was seventeen years old, for the last five years of his life was obliged to be lifted up by a machine, when he lay down, which he rarely did. This was evidently an effect of confinement, which had so weakened the muscular power of his body as to give some probability to the old fable that the elephant, in a state of nature, always sleeps in a standing posi- tion against a tree*. Another elephant, which was * Perrault, Memoires, tom. ii. p. 507.