A domestic elephant does, perhaps, to his master more real service than five or six horses; but he requires much care and abundance of good food; it is computed that he consumes to the amount of an hundred pence per day. He is commonly fed with raw or boiled rice mixed with water; and it is reckoned he wants one hundred pounds of rice daily to be kept in his full vigour; they give him also grass to cool him, for he is often over-heated, and must be led to the water that he may bathe two or three times a day; he easily learns to wash himself; he takes the water up in his trunk, carries it to his mouth, drinks part, and then by elevating his trunk, lets the remainder flow over every part of his body. To give an idea of the services he is able to perform, it is sufficient to observe, that all the bags, bales, and parcels, which are transported from one place to another in the Indies, are carried by elephants; that they carry burdens on their bodies, their necks, their tusks, and even with their mouths, by giving them the end of a rope which they hold with their teeth. When the elephant is taken care of he lives a long time even in captivity; and it is to be presumed, that in a state of liberty his life is still longer. Some authors say he lives four or five hundred years; others, two or three hundred; and others, one hundred and twenty, thirty, and even one hundred and fifty years. I take this last opinion to be the nearest to the truth; and if it is certain, that captive elephants live one hundred and twenty or thirty years; those who are free, and enjoy all the conveniences and rights of Nature, must live at least two hundred; besides, if their gestation lasts two years, and thirty years are required to bring them to their full growth, we may be assured that their life extends to the term we have mentioned. It is not so much the captivity, as the change of climate which shortens their existence: whatever care is taken of the elephant, he does not live long in temperate, and still shorter in cold climates. The elephant which the King of Portugal sent to Louis XIV. in 1668, and who was then but four years old, died in his seventeenth, in January 1681, and lived only thirteen years in the menagerie of Versailles, where he was treated with care and tenderness, and fed with profusion; he had every day four score pounds of bread, twelve pints of wine, two buckets of porridge, with four or five pounds of bread in it, the last was changed every other day for two buckets of rice boiled in water, without reckoning what was given him by visitors. He had, besides, every day a sheaf of corn to amuse himself; for, after eating the ears, he made large whisps of the straw, and used them to drive away the flies. He delighted in breaking the straw in small bits, which he did with great dexterity with his trunk; and as he was led to walk daily, he pulled and eat the grass. The elephant who was lately at Naples,