Page:In brightest Africa.djvu/43

 now, the African elephant is the most fascinating, and that man, for all the thousands of years he has known of elephants, knows mighty little about him. I am speaking only of the African elephant. He has not been domesticated as his Indian cousin has. The two are different in size and different in shape and different in habits. The low point of an African elephant's back line is the highest point of that of the Indian elephant. The African elephant's ears and tusks are larger, and his tusks usually spread wider at the points instead of coming together. Unless one studies him in his native haunts, one cannot get to know him. His disposition is held to be wilder than that of the Indian elephant, but the infrequency of his appearance in circuses and in zoölogical parks may be attributed to the ease with which tamed elephants may be obtained from India rather than to a difference of temper in the two beasts. An African elephant at Washington and one in the Bronx zoological park are the only ones I know of in this country, and no animal in captivity can give one more than a slight idea of his natural habits in his jungle home.

Very few people have studied African elephants in the field. Ninety-five per cent. of those who have followed them have been purely hunters and their desire has been, not to study, but to shoot—to see the elephant the shortest possible time. Time to judge the ivories and get a bead on the brain was all that they wanted. Of other elephant knowledge all that they needed was the simple facts of how to follow and