Mr. Corse says, “During the war with Tippoo Sultan, of the fifteen hundred elephants under the management of Capt. Sandys, not one was ten feet high, and only a few males nine and a half feet high.” He was very particular in ascertaining the height of elephants used at Madras and in the army under Marquis Cornwallis, from the fact that the most remarkable stories were current at the time concerning large elephants. Madras elephants were reported from fifteen to twenty feet high. The Nabob of Dacca was said to have one, fourteen feet in height; and Mr. Corse took a journey to the locality purposely to measure it. He found, that instead of twelve feet, as he thought barely possible, the elephant was only ten. If any of my readers wish to test the accuracy of any statement as to an elephant’s height, they have only to measure the distance around its foot twice, which will give nearly the exact height at the shoulder. This is as deceptive as guessing the height of a silk hat or the length of a horse’s head. A party of young people were once watching some elephants, when the question was propounded how many times around the foot would equal the height. The answers were all over ten, and one was fifteen. As the circumference of the fore-foot of the average elephant is about fifty-four inches, this would have given them an animal over sixty feet high. It has been supposed by some authors, that elephants are not as tall now as formerly, that they have degenerated in size as the world grew older; but this is not borne out by facts. The Emperor Baber (a contemporary of Henry VII.) says, “They say in some islands about Hindostan, elephants grow to the height of ten gez [about twenty feet]. I have never seen one above four or five gez” [eight or ten feet]. The elephants from Hindostan are the smallest; those from Pegu and Ava being larger, as a rule. A skeleton from the latter country was presented to the Czar Peter by the King of Persia; and the taxidermist managed to give it a height, when mounted in the museum at St. Petersburg, of sixteen and a half feet.