III.
ELEPHANTS.
They are Square Animals with a Leg at each Corner and a Tail at both Ends. — “My Lord the Elephant.” — That it picks up Pins. — The Mammoth as a Missionary in Africa. — An Elephant Hunt with the Prince. — Elephantine Potentialities.— A Mad Giant. — Bigness not of Necessity a Virtue. — A Digression on the Meekness of Giants.
ELEPHANTS are square animals with a leg at each corner and a tail at both ends. This may be said to be the popular description of the Titan among mammals.
Nor is its moral character more accurately summed up by the crowd. It has, indeed, come to be a time-honored custom when looking at Jumbo, the elephant which Barnum has bought from “the Zoo” in London, to applaud first its sagacity, as evidenced, they say, in that old story of the tailor who pricked an elephant’s trunk with his imprudent needle; next, its docility, as shown (so the crowd would have us believe) by its carrying children about on its back; in the third place the great sensitiveness of its trunk, inasmuch as it can pick up a pin with it; and, finally, its great size. After this, nothing apparently remains but to congratulate ourselves, in a lofty way, upon having thus comprehensively traversed all the elephant’s claims to respect, and to pass on to the next beast in the show.
