“Nature’s great masterpiece, an elephant; The only harmless great thing: Yet Nature hath given him no knee to bend: Himself he up-props, on himself relies; Still sleeping stands.”[62] Sir THOMAS BROWNE, while he argues against the delusion, does not fail to record his suspicion, that “although the opinion at present be reasonably well suppressed, yet from the strings of tradition and fruitful recurrence of errour, it was not improbable it might revive in the next generation;”[63]—an anticipation which has proved singularly correct; for the heralds still continued to explain that the elephant is the emblem of watchfulness, “_nec jacet in somno_,”[64] and poets almost of our own times paint the scene when “Peaceful, beneath primeval trees, that cast Their ample shade on Niger’s yellow stream, Or where the Ganges rolls his sacred waves, _Leans_ the huge elephant.”[65] It is not difficult to discern whence this antiquated delusion took its origin; nor is it, as Sir THOMAS BROWNE imagined, to be traced exclusively “to the grosse and cylindricall structure” of the animal’s legs. The fact is, that the elephant, returning in the early morning from his nocturnal revels in the reservoirs and watercourses, is accustomed to rub his muddy sides against a tree, and sometimes against a rock if more convenient. Often in my rides at sunrise through the northern forests, the natives of Ceylon have pointed out that the elephants which had preceded me must have been of considerable size, judging from the height at which their marks had been left on the trees against which they had recently been rubbing. Not unfrequently the animals themselves, overcome with drowsiness from the night’s gambolling, are found dozing and resting against the trees they had so visited, and in the same manner they have been discovered by sportsmen asleep, and leaning against a rock. It is scarcely necessary to explain that the position is accidental, and that it is taken by the elephant not from any difficulty in lying at length on the ground, but rather from the coincidence that the structure of his legs affords such support in a standing position, that reclining scarcely adds to his enjoyment of repose; and elephants in a state of captivity have been known for months together to sleep without lying down.[66] So distinctive is this formation, and so self-sustaining the configuration of the limbs, that an elephant shot in the brain, by Major Rogers in 1836, was killed so instantaneously that it died literally _on its knees_, and remained resting on them. About the year 1826, Captain Dawson, the engineer of the great road to Kandy, over the Kaduganava pass, shot an elephant at Hangwelle on the banks of the Kalany Ganga; _it remained on its feet_, but so motionless, that after discharging a few more balls, he was induced to go close to it, and found it dead.