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.

    49/412 (page 39)
    of a living* elephant is exceedingly deceptive, even to those who are most accustomed to the animal. Mr. Corse measured a celebrated elephant ot the Nabob of Dacca, which was generally stated to be fourteen feet high, and which he considered to be twelve ;— it was found not to exceed ten feet. The elephants of Hindostan are, however, the smallest ol the Asiatic species. Those from Pegu and Ava are much larger; and the skeleton of the elephant at the Museum at Petersburgh, which was sent to the Czar Peter by the King of Persia, measures sixteen feet and a half in height. Still, it is probable that few elephants of more than nine feet in height have been brought to Europe. Neither the male nor female which the French took from Holland were eight feet in height. The ele- phant of Hindostan has certainly not degenerated in size for several centuries; for the Emperor Baber (a contemporary of our Henry VII.) observes, “ they say that in some islands the elephant grows to the height of ten gez (about twenty feet). I have never, in these countries, seen one above four or five gez*” (eight or ten feet). That the Hindoos had a tolerably definite notion of the medium height of an elephant, as we have of that of a cow or a horse, maybe collected from another passage inthe^same amusing book, where the writer, describing a cavity in a rock, says, “ it was as high as an elephant.” The African species is generally larger than the Indian. Mr. Pringle informs us, that he met with an enormous bull elephant, (the Hottentots called him “ a big terrible fellow, plenty, plenty big,”) which two en- gineer officers agreed was fourteen feet high. Major Denham, on his expedition to the Tchad, fell in with elephants which he guessed to be sixteen feet in heightbut one which was killed in his presence, and which he describes as an immense fellow, mea- * Memoirs of Baber, p. 316.