The Wild Elephant and the Method of Capturing and Taming it in Ceylon

The Wild Elephant and the Method of Capturing and Taming it in Ceylon

In this volume, the chapters descriptive of the structure and habits of the wild elephant are reprinted for the sixth time from a larger work,1 published originally in 1859. Since the appearance of the First Edition, many corrections and much additional matter have been supplied to me, chiefly from India and Ceylon, and will be found embodied in the following pages. To one of these in particular I feel bound to direct attention. In the course of a more enlarged essay on the zoology of Ceylon,2 amongst other proofs of a geological origin for that island, distinct from that of the adjacent continent of India, as evidenced by peculiarities in the flora and fauna of each respectively, I had occasion to advert to a discovery which had been recently announced viii by Temminck in his Survey of the Dutch possessions in the Indian Archipelago,3 that the elephant which abounds in Sumatra (although unknown in the adjacent island of Java), and which had theretofore been regarded as identical in species with the Indian one, has been found to possess peculiarities, in which it differs as much from the elephant of India as the latter does from its African congener. On this new species, to which the natives give the name of gadjah, Temminck has conferred the scientific designation of the Elephas Sumatranus. The points which entitle it to this distinction he enumerates minutely in the work4 before alluded to, and they have been summarized as follows by Prince Lucien Bonaparte. This species is perfectly intermediate between the Indian and African, especially in the shape of the skull, and will certainly put an end to the distinction between Elephas and Loxodon, with those who admit that anatomical genus; since although the crowns of the teeth of E. Sumatranus are more like the Asiatic animal, still the less numerous undulated ribbons of enamel are nearly quite as wide as those forming the lozenges of the African. The number of pairs of false ribs (which alone vary, the true ones being always six) is fourteen, one less than in ix the Africanus, one more than in the Indicus; and so it is with the dorsal vertebr, which are twenty in the Sumatranus (twenty-one and nineteen in the others), whilst the new species agrees with Africanus in the number of sacral vertebr (four), and with Indicus in that of the caudal ones, which are thirty-four.5 ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 56488
Author: Tennent, James Emerson
Release Date: Feb 2, 2018
Format: eBook
Language: English