IV.
THE ELEPHANT’S FELLOW-COUNTRYMEN.
The Rhinoceros a Victim of Ill-Natured Personality. — In the Glacial Period. — The Hippopotamus. — Popular Sympathy with it. — Behemoth a Useless Person. — Extinct Monsters and the World they Lived in. — The Impossible Giraffe. — Its Intelligent use of its Head as a Hammer. — The Advantages and Disadvantages of so much Neck. — Its High Living. — The Zebra. — Nature’s Parsimony in the matter of Paint on the Skins of Animals. — Some Suggestions towards more Gayety.
ELEPHANTS, there is no doubt, are favorites with the public, and they merit their popularity. It is difficult, perhaps, to say as much for their cousins, the rhinoceroses. For some reason or another, the public resent the personal appearance of these animals, and no one compliments them. Straightforward opprobrium is bad enough, no doubt, but depreciatory innuendo is still harder to bear, just as the old writer tells us, in the matter of the patient patriarch, that “the oblique expostulations of his friends were a deeper injury to Job than the downright blows of the Devil.”
A rhinoceros, therefore, when he stands at the bars with his mouth open in expectation of the donation which is seldom thrown in, hears much that must embitter his hours of solitary reflection. The remarks of visitors are never relieved by any reference to his sagacity or docility, as in the case of the elephant; nor
