The tusks of the elephant, in the different species or races, differ according to sex, in nearly the same manner as the horns of ruminants. In India and Malacca the males alone are provided with well-developed tusks. The elephant of Ceylon is considered by most naturalists as a distinct race, but by some as a distinct species, and here “not one in a hundred is found with tusks, the few that possess them being exclusively males.”[303] The African elephant is undoubtedly distinct, and the female has large, well-developed tusks, though not so large as those of the male. These differences in the tusks of the several races and species of elephants—the great variability of the horns of deer, as notably in the wild reindeer—the occasional presence of horns in the female _Antilope bezoartica_—the presence of two tusks in some few male narwhals—the complete absence of tusks in some female walruses;—are all instances of the extreme variability of secondary sexual characters, and of their extreme liability to differ in closely-allied forms. Although tusks and horns appear in all cases to have been primarily developed as sexual weapons, they often serve for other purposes. The elephant uses his tusks in attacking the tiger; according to Bruce, he scores the trunks of trees until they can be easily thrown down, and he likewise thus extracts the farinaceous cores of palms; in Africa he often uses one tusk, this being always the same, to probe the ground and thus to ascertain whether it will bear his weight. The common bull defends the herd with his horns; and the elk in Sweden has been known, according to Lloyd, to strike a wolf dead with a single blow of his great horns. Many similar facts could be given. One of the most curious secondary uses to which the horns of any animal are occasionally put, is that observed by Captain Hutton[304] with the wild goat (_Capra ægagrus_) of the Himalayas, and as it is said with the ibex, namely, that when the male accidentally falls from a height he bends inwards his head, and, by alighting on his massive horns, breaks the shock. The female cannot thus use her horns, which are smaller, but from her more quiet disposition she does not so much need this strange kind of shield.