During my residence at Kandy, I had twice the opportunity of witnessing the operation on a grand scale, of capturing wild elephants, intended to be trained for the public service in the establishment of the Civil Engineer;--and in the course of my frequent journeys through the interior of the island, I succeeded in collecting so many facts relative to the habits of these interesting animals in a state of nature, as enable me not only to add to the information previously possessed, but to correct many fallacies popularly received regarding their instincts and disposition. These particulars I am anxious to place on record before proceeding to describe the scenes of which I was a spectator, during the progress of the elephant hunts in the district of the Seven Korles, at which I was present in 1846, and again in 1847. With the exception of the narrow but densely inhabited belt of cultivated land, that extends along the seaborde of the island from Chilaw on the western coast to Tangalle on the south-east, there is no part of Ceylon in which elephants may not be said to abound; even close to the environs of the most populous localities of the interior. They frequent both the open plains and the deep forests; and their footsteps are to be seen wherever food and shade, vegetation and water[1], allure them, alike on the summits of the loftiest mountains, and on the borders of the tanks and lowland streams. [Footnote 1: M. AD. PICTET has availed himself of the love of the elephant for water, to found on it a solution of the long-contested question as to the etymology of the word "elephant,"-a term which, whilst it has passed into almost every dialect of the West, is scarcely to be traced in any language of Asia. The Greek [Greek: elephas], to which we are immediately indebted for it, did not originally mean the animal, but, as early as the time of Homer, was applied only to its tusks, and signified _ivory_. BOCHART has sought for a Semitic origin, and seizing on the Arabic _fil_, and prefixing the article _al_, suggests _alfil_, akin to [Greek: eleph]; but rejecting this, BOCHART himself resorts to the Hebrew _eleph_, an "ox"--and this conjecture derives a certain degree of countenance from the fact that the Romans, when they obtained their first sight of the elephant in the army of Pyrrhus, in Lucania, called it the _Luca bos_. But the [Greek: antos] is still unaccounted for; and POTT has sought to remove the difficulty by introducing the Arabic _hindi_, Indian, s thus making _eleph-hindi_, "_bos Indicus_." The conversion of _hindi_ into [Greek: antos] is an obstacle, but here the example of "tamarind" comes to aid; _tamar hindi_, the "Indian date," which in mediæval Greek forms [Greek: tamarenti]. A theory of Benary, that helhephas might be compounded of the Arabic _al_, and _ibha_, a Sanskrit name for the elephant, is exposed to still greater etymological exception. PICTET'S solution is,