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.

    93/412 (page 83)
    had tolerable evidence, from the accounts of the keepers of elephants in India, that particular in- dividuals had been in captivity from one hundred to one hundred and thirty years. The elephant is, doubtless, a very long- lived animal; and the provi- sion for the renewal of its teeth shews that the Author of Nature intended that his abode on this earth should be, in comparison with other quadru- peds, and even with man, a prolonged existence. Pliny, upon the authority of Aristotle, states that the elephant lived two or three hundred years ; and the Romans, in the time of Gordian, in the spirit ot poetical exaggeration, chose an elephant for the symbol of eternity*. * Sallengre Thesaurus, tom. iii.p. 212. The above, medal was struck in honour of Tranquillina, the wife of Gordian. Cuper thinks that the legend “ ^Eternitas Aug.” is expressive of a wish for the long continuance of the reign of the emperor—as long even as the life of the elephant.