Hide browse bar Your current position in the text is marked in blue. Click anywhere in the line to jump to another position:
This text is part of:
Table of Contents:










1 As to the tusks of the elephant, no doubt the opinion of Herodotus, B. iii. c. 97, is correct, that they are teeth, and not horns. They are essentially composed of the same substance with the other teeth, and, like them, are inserted into the jaw, and not into the os frontis, as. is the case with horns.—B.
2 Not improbably, the great quantity of fossil ivory which has been found, may have given rise to this tale. We have in Lemaire, vol. iii. p. 581, a long extract from Cuvier's "Recherches sur les ossements fossiles," in which he gives an account of the parts of the world in which the bones of the elephant have been discovered.—B.
3 Tables and bedsteads were not only covered or veneered with ivory among the Romans, but, in the later times, made of the solid material, as we learn from Ælian and Athenæus.
4 Plutarch, in his treatise on the Shrewdness of Animals, gives the same statement respecting the whiteness of the teeth in the young animal. —B.
5 It is scarcely necessary to remark, that these statements respecting the sagacity of the elephant in connection with their teeth, are without foundation.—B.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.