In all his rambles, covering nearly twenty years in the heart of the elephant country, Mr. Sanderson never found an elephant that had died a natural death, nor did he ever meet with a professional native elephant-hunter who had, except during an epidemic among the animals in the Chittagong forest. This seems extremely remarkable when it is remembered that, while the flesh might be devoured, the bones and tusks would last a long time. The same belief is entertained by the wild tribes of Ceylon. Sir Emerson Tennent says, “The natives generally assert that the body of a dead elephant is seldom or never discovered in the woods, and certain it is, that frequenters of the forest with whom I had conversed, whether European or Singhalese, alike are consistent in their assurances that they have never found the remains of a dead elephant that had died a natural death. One chief, the Wanyyah of the Trincomalie district, told a friend of mine, that, once after a severe murrain which had swept the province, he found the carcasses of elephants that had died of the disease. On the other hand, a European gentleman, who for thirty-six years without intermission had been living in the jungle, ascending to the summits of mountains in the prosecution of the trigonometrical survey, and penetrating valleys in tracing roads, and opening means of communication,—one, too, who has made the habits of the wild elephant a subject of constant study and observation,—has often expressed to me his astonishment that, after seeing many thousands of living elephants in all possible situations, he had never yet found a single skeleton of a dead one, except those which had fallen by a rifle.” The Singhalese have a superstition in relation to the close of life in the elephant. They believe that, on feeling the approach of dissolution, he repairs to a solitary valley, and there resigns himself to death. A native who accompanied Mr. Cripps, when hunting in the forests of Anarájapoora, intimated to him that he was then in the immediate vicinity of the spot “to which the elephants come to die,” but that it was so mysteriously concealed, that, although every one believed in its existence, no one had ever succeeded in penetrating it. At the corral of Kornegalle in 1847, one of the Kandyan chiefs assured him that it was the universal belief of his countrymen, that the elephants, when about to die, resorted to a valley in an unknown spot among the mountains to the east of Adams Peak, which was reached by a narrow pass with walls of rock on each side, and that here, by the side of a lake of clear water, they took their last repose. While this belief is held by some natives of Continental India, there is not a spot in the elephant country that has not been penetrated by either Europeans or natives; yet the latter are not convinced, and the mystery as to what becomes of the dead elephants is as deep as ever. The elephants that die in captivity are victims to