"I have several times observed, (says Edward Terry) that the elephant does many things which seemed to be more the result of a rational than an instinctive faculty. He does whatever his master commands him. If he wishes him to frighten any body, he advances towards him with the same fury as if he would tear him to pieces, and when near he stops short, without doing him any harm. If the master is inclined to affront another, he speaks to the elephant, who takes up dirty water with his trunk, and throws it over the person pointed out to him. His trunk is made of a cartilage, hangs betwixt his tusks, and by some called his hand, because on many occasions it is as serviceable to him as the hand is to men. The Mogul keeps elephants for the execution of criminals condemned to death. If their leader bids them dispatch the wretched creatures quickly, they tear them to pieces in a moment with their feet; but if commanded to make the criminals languish, they break their bones one after another, and make them suffer torments as cruel as those of the wheel." We might quote several other facts equally curious and interesting, but we should exceed the limits of this work; we should not have even entered into so many particulars, if the elephant (_fig. 133._) were not, of all animals, the first in every respect, and that which consequently deserves most attention. We have said nothing respecting the production of his ivory because M. Daubenton has made several useful observations upon the nature and quality of it, but he has at the same time assigned to the elephant the tusks, and prodigious bones attributed to the mammoth. I confess I was long doubtful on this subject; I had several times considered those enormous bones, and compared them with the skeleton of an almost adult elephant preserved in the king's cabinet, and before writing the history of those animals, I could not persuade myself that elephants six or seven times bigger than the one whose skeleton I had seen, could exist; more especially, as the large bones had not the same proportions with the corresponding ones of the elephant, I thought with the generality of naturalists that these enormous bones had belonged to an animal much larger, whose species was lost or annihilated. But it is certain, as we have mentioned before, that some elephants exist who are fourteen feet high, that is, six or seven times bigger (for the bulk is in proportion to the cube in height) than the elephant, of whose skeleton we have spoken, and which was not more than seven feet and a half in height. It is also certain, for the observations of M. Daubenton, that age changes the proportion of the bones and when the animal is adult, they grow considerably thicker, though they are come to their full height: in fine, it is certain, from the relations of travellers, that of some elephants, the tusks weigh more than 120lbs.[AH] From these observations, we cannot doubt that those tusks