The elephant’s trunk is a tool surpassed in effectiveness only by the hand of man. It is a muscular prolongation of combined nose and upper lip, which have grown together. It is associated closely with the motor and sensory centers in the brain cortex and is under such delicate voluntary control that with its enormous strength is combined extreme fineness of movement. The trunk terminates in one of two fingerlike projections which seem capable of almost as delicate voluntary movements as are human fingers. The trunk is a supernose. As a sensory organ it is the elephant’s chief means of securing information about his environment. With it the animal can detect the direction, and perhaps the distance, of olfactory stimuli from all sorts of sources. It is as vital in an elephantine scheme of things as are eyes to a human being. The trunk is the elephant’s chief servant Without it the monster is the equivalent of a blind man. It has approximately 40,000 muscles and a highly developed sensory and motor nerve supply. The organ has enormous strength, sufficient to tear up a tree by its roots. Here are some of the things the animal is credited with being able to do with the trunk: pick up a pin from the ground, select and secure a single tussock of appetizing herbage, uncork a wine bottle, untie a slip knot, unbolt a gate, throw up and catch a baseball, pull the trigger to fire a gun, ring a bell. A female elephant owned by the Duke of Devonshire in the 1880’s was allowed almost a free range over the park of his estate. She made herself useful by sweeping the paths with a broom and by carrying a garden watering pot. Her most celebrated achievement was that of opening a tightly corked wine bottle. She would hold it against the ground at about a 45 degree angle with one of her front feet and gradually twist out the cork—barely protruding above the neck of the bottle—with her trunk. After emptying the contents into her mouth she would hand the empty bottle to her keeper. _Fiendish Vampires of the Night_ About the middle of the eighteenth century belief in vampirism spread like an epidemic across France and England. Dead men hellishly condemned to live forever came out of their sepulchres at midnight, took the forms of various animals, and feasted on the blood of the living (who, in turn, died and became vampires). This was a superstition which previously had been confined largely to Slavic countries. Its influence in France and England seems to have started with tales brought back from the New World by Spanish explorers of actual vampires—sinister, black-winged, fiend-faced flying mammals who actually fed on the blood of sleeping humans. Thenceforth the popular conception of a vampire was that of a large bat, hovering over the unsuspecting, eternally doomed sleeper.