The Indian elephant is known sometimes to weep. Sir E. Tennent, in
describing these which he saw captured and bound in Ceylon, says, some
“lay motionless on the ground, with no other indication of suffering
than the tears which suffused their eyes and flowed incessantly.”
Speaking of another elephant he says, “When overpowered and made fast,
his grief was most affecting; his violence sank to utter prostration,
and he lay on the ground, uttering choking cries, with tears trickling
down his cheeks.”[620] In the Zoological Gardens the keeper of the
Indian elephants positively asserts that he has several times seen
tears rolling down the face of the old female, when distressed by the
removal of the young one. Hence I was extremely anxious to ascertain,
as an extension of the relation between the contraction of the
orbicular muscles and the shedding of tears in man, whether elephants
when screaming or trumpeting loudly contract these muscles. At Mr.
Bartlett’s desire the keeper ordered the old and the young elephant to
trumpet; and we repeatedly saw in both animals that, just as the
trumpeting began, the orbicular muscles, especially the lower ones,
were distinctly contracted. On a subsequent occasion the keeper made
the old elephant trumpet much more loudly, and invariably both the
upper and lower orbicular muscles were strongly contracted, and now in
an equal degree. It is a singular fact that the African elephant,
which, however, is so different from the Indian species that it is
placed by some naturalists in a distinct sub-genus, when made on two
occasions to trumpet loudly, exhibited no trace of the contraction of
the orbicular muscles.
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