I believe some people suppose the Carthaginians tamed and used the African elephant; they could hardly have had Mahouts Indian fashion, for there is no marked depression in the nape of the neck for a seat, and the hemming of the ears,[3] when erected, would have half-smothered them. My knowledge does not allow me to raise any argument on this point; but might not the same market have been open to the dwellers at Carthage as was afterwards to Mithridates, who, I suppose, drew his supply from India, where they have been broken and made to do man’s work from time immemorial? _Vide_ friezes, carvings, pictures, stories, myths innumerable--the last running back into obscurity--the elephant holding in them the position of the ‘gin’ in the Arab tales. Half the world has at one time been the _habitat_ of this great pachyderm or its congeners. Siberia, with its fossil ivory mines, and Europe everywhere, are its tombs. Destroyed or driven south by some climatic change, India and Africa are its present homes; but in Africa the place thereof shall soon know it no more, and to our great-great-grandchildren the old ‘tlou’ will be as the mammoth is to us. The elephant’s age is a disputed point; but, as no one has quite decided, let me put it down at 200 years, upon these two grounds: 1st, that most animals live four or five times as long as they take to attain maturity, and an elephant is certainly not a ‘man’ till he is fifty; 2ndly, that I had charge for the Government of a large take of elephants caught in a ‘coopum’ in India. They were sometimes, while being broken, very troublesome, and if they got beyond the control of the men a tame elephant, ‘Lachmé,’ was called in to ‘whip’ them. Lachmé had been a pagoda elephant sixty years; we had the record of her capture as a full-grown female. That makes her upwards of a hundred, and she was then, in 1847, quite in her prime, without a sign of old age, and I dare say is very much the same still. The young calves, too, are the smallest beasts for the size they afterwards attain, and must take a long while growing. Such tinies are they that I have had them run under my pony, and touched their little pinky bodies with my foot--poor morsels! I never could shoot the female with any satisfaction, and I think I never did at all but twice; males were plentiful enough.