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.

    366/412 (page 356)
    the valley of the Arno, that the peasants used formerly to employ them, united with stones, in building the little walls round their farms. Many of these remains have been found in that particular species of sand called tufo by the Italians, which contains marine sub- stances and wood in a state of petrifaction; others have been dug up at the base of small clay-hills filling the intervals of the calcareous chain, together with petrified and bituminized wood. Some of the bones in these collections have been those of very young elephants,—a sufficiently satisfactory proof that the living animals must have existed in a state quite incompatible with the limited numbers and the rapid movements of those under subjection to man— a state, in fact, of natural liberty that allowed of their indefinite increase. It is to be remarked, also, that in almost every case where elephants’ bones have been discovered, the tusks have been found with them. We have seen that very soon after the ele- phant was known in Italy, ivory was used in the arts ; and it is not to be conceived that while a large price was paid for this material, wherever sculpture was practised, the carcass of a single elephant should have been suffered to rot without securing this valu- able substance for purposes of commerce. In Sicily and in Spain the bones of elephants have been discovered at various times, in large quantities. As the animal was used in war in these regions, such remains were at first naturally considered as the me- morials of ancient battles. In France, also, they have been found scattered through the country ; and it is remarkable enough, as supporting the theory that they had belonged to domesticated elephants, that those which were found the earliest, or which at least were first noticed, were in the neighbourhood of the Rhone, in parts where Hannibal is known to have