No negro tribe really likes to handle elephants and train them. The Indian native loves elephants, and enjoys training them and working with them. It is these two conditions that have left the African elephant far behind the procession. The African elephant belongs to the great Undeveloped Continent. He has been, and he still is, mercilessly pursued and slaughtered for his tusks. All the existing species of African elephants are going down and out before the ivory hunters. We fear that they will all be dead one hundred years from this time, or even less. A century hence, when the last _africanus_ has gone to join the mammoth and the mastodon, his well protected wild congener in India still will be devouring his four hundred pounds of green fodder per day, and the tame ones will be performing to amuse the swarming human millions of this overcrowded world. In the minds of our elephant keepers, familiarity with elephants has bred just the reverse of contempt. Both Thuman and Richards are quite sure that elephants are the wisest of all wild animals. Despite the very great amount of trouble made for Keeper Thuman by Gunda, the Indian, and Kartoum, the African, Thuman grows enthusiastic over the shrewdness of their "cussedness." He is particularly impressed by their skill in opening chain shackles, and unfastening the catches and locks of doors and gates. And really, Kartoum's ingenuity in finding out how to open latches and bolts is almost inexhaustible, as well as marvelous. Keeper Richards declares that our late African pygmy elephant, Congo, was the wisest animal he ever has known. I have elsewhere referred to his ability in shutting his outside door. Richards taught him to accept coins from visitors, deposit them in a box, then pull a cord to ring a bell, one pull for each coin represented. The keeper devised four different systems of intimate signals by which he could tell Congo to stop at the right point, and all these were so slight that no one ever detected them. One was by a voice-given cue, another by a hand motion, and a third was by an inclination of the body. Keeper Richards relates that Congo would go out in his yard, collect a trunkful of peanuts from visitors, bring them inside and secretly cache them in a corner behind his feed box. Then he would go out for more graft peanuts, bring them in, hide them and proceed to eat the first lot. There are millions of men who do not know what it is to conserve something that can be eaten.