Many curious beliefs have clustered around the elephant, his sagacity, great strength, and association with the wonderful countries of Africa and India giving occasion for much that is marvellous. One old writer tells that “the elephant is a beast of great strength, but greater wit, and greatest ambition; insomuch that some have written of them that if you praise them they will kill themselves with labour, and if you command another before them they will break their hearts with emulation. The beast is so proud of his strength that he never bows himself to any, and when he is once down (as it usually is with proud great ones) he cannot rise up again.” The female elephant was supposed to rear her young one in deep water, for fear lest the dragon should find and devour it. Physiologus says that when the bone of an elephant shall be burnt, or his hair singed, the smell of it shall drive away serpents and all poison. Isidore informs us that the elephant is beyond measure great, and that it has the form of a goat, a statement that leads us to imagine that he writes rather from hearsay than from personal knowledge. He further tells us that the creature cannot lie down, a statement that is entirely opposed to fact, as they may be seen rolling to and fro with the greatest ease when bathing, and after their ablutions recovering their feet with great readiness. This supposed inability to lie down necessitated the elephant’s leaning against a wall or tree while sleeping, and the people of the land, when they desired to capture one, had only to fell the tree or undermine the wall, while the elephant was in happy unconsciousness of the rude awakening that they were preparing for him. “The elephant so huge and strong to see No perill fear’d but thought a sleepe to gaine; But foes before had underminde the tree, And down he falls, and so by them was slaine. First trye, then truste; like goulde the copper showes; And Nero oft in Numa’s clothinge goes.” WHITNEY’S _Emblems_. They are provoked to madness at the sight of blood or of the juice of the mulberry tree. They eat both leaves and stones, but if by inadvertence they swallow a chameleon the result is fatal, unless they can immediately afterwards eat some olives. As no elephant, being a vegetarian, would eat a chameleon knowingly, we are reduced to the alternative that he must eat him unconsciously, and would therefore feel nothing of the need of a prompt administration of antidote until the olives came too late.