the same troubles that affect all animals, and the wild elephant is probably no exception. At the commissariat at Bengal, one hundred and fourteen elephants died in 1874-75. Eleven died of apoplexy, three of dysentery, five of inflammation of the lungs, thirteen of debility, one of cold, twenty-six of zahirbad, one of vomiting, three of colic, and one of congestion of the brain,—abundant proof to the superstitious native that the elephant is susceptible to dissolution. Ceylon elephants are remarkable for the numbers born without tusks. These are called mucknas, and differ in no other respect from the elephants of Continental India. They resemble ordinary females; the tusks being extremely small, and useless as defence. Sometimes they are larger than ordinary tuskers; but this may be mere accident, as is their dental defect, and it is not an hereditary trait. So rare is a good tusker in Ceylon, that one is looked upon as a curiosity. Sir Samuel Baker states that not over one in three hundred possessed them; and to show the difference between these and the continental elephant, out of one hundred and forty, fifty-one of which were males, captured by Mr. Sanderson in Mysore, Bengal, in 1874-76, only five were mucknas, or tuskless. We should expect to find theories at least to explain this strange difference in an adjoining country, where the climate and food conditions are almost identical (the food in Ceylon is easier to obtain); but I am not aware that any of importance have been expressed. As large and powerful as the elephant is, it is easily dismayed and alarmed; and many have an especial aversion to small animals. Thus, some elephants have a great dislike for small dogs; and a mouse has been known to cause a large tusker to snort with fear. Wild hogs are particularly disagreeable to the great animals, and it appears that this was known to the ancients; as Procopius, the historian of the Persian and Gothic wars, states that at the siege of Edessa by Chosroes, the king of Persia, in the time of Justinian, the besieged Greeks imitated the cry of the pig to frighten the elephants of the enemy. In fact, elephants are like other animals. They have their likes and dislikes; and their alarm at a mouse, in justice to some of the human race, should not be used, as it often is, as an argument in proof of their supposed cowardice and lack of intelligence. CHAPTER III. THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE ELEPHANT.