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.

    60/412 (page 50)
    manded the admiration of all who have witnessed its remarkable powers. The child and the philosopher, the refined Roman and the rude African, have equally been struck with its astonishing; union of flexibility and strength. Cicero calls it, by a bold figure of speech, “ the elephant’s hand;”—Lucretius, even more expressively, describes it by the word “ angui- manus,” the snake-hand;—and the Calfre, who has learnt nothing from the poets and orators, but is taught by nature alone, when he kills an elephant approaches the trunk with a superstitious awe, and, cutting it off, solemnly inters it, repeatedly exclaim- ing, “ The elephant is a great lord, and the trunk is his hand*.” Before we proceed to a description of the uses of the trunk, we shall present, as clearly as we can, a view of its anatomical construction. The most pre- cise details of this somewhat complex subject are those given by Cuvier, upon his dissection of two elephantsf. The author of the “ Anatomical account of the Elephant burnt at Dublin” was not allowed to dissect the trunk; but he says, “ where the fire had entered upon it, I could distinctly perceive three orders of fibres ; one obliquely and spirally descend- ing ; another spirally but crosswise descending ; the third were strait fibres.” He adds, “ several of the motions of his proboscis might be performed by the afore-mentioned three distinct series of muscular fibres; as its contraction, motion up or down, to the right or to the left; but by what means he was able at pleasure to shoot it out, from a foot, upon any sudden occasion, to five feet long, and that with extraordinary force, I cannot clearly perceive.” This is the problem which later anatomists have endea- * Rose’s Southern Africa, p. 155. | See Lemons U’Anatomie Comparee, tom, v,