ninth to the nineteenth century there is a record of 144 successful prosecutions of animals, vermin included, and these are thought to be only a fraction of the total number of such litigations. The age which brought them was no less sure that insects had rights, including the right of subsistence, than that the Church had effectual power over them. The Elephant About the larger creatures fable has been busy and the foremost figure is naturally the hugest of the land animals; only with mediæval and heraldic times did the lion win pre-eminence. Classic tradition revolves around the elephant's intelligence, morality, and social traits. There are stories of its understanding Greek, and even writing it. As Pliny repeats, "it is sensible alike of the pleasures of love and glory, and, to a degree that is rare among men even, possesses notions of honesty, prudence, and equity; it has a religious respect also for the stars, and a veneration for the sun and the moon." When surrounded by hunters, report had it that elephants placed themselves in battle line, with the smaller-tusked animals in front, so that the enemy might see that the spoil was unworthy the seeking. When they perceived themselves about to be overcome, they broke off their teeth against a tree in order to pay their ransom. While other animals avoided fire, they resisted and fought it because they saw it destroyed the forests. When worn out by disease, they have been seen lying on their backs and casting grass up into the air, "as if deputing the earth to intercede for them with its prayers. John Lok, in his Voyage to Guinea, paraphrases an ancient belief as to the feud between the elephant and what he calls the dragon: "They have continual warre against Dragons, which desire their blood, because it is very colde; and therefore the Dragon lying awaite as the Elephant passeth by, windeth his taile, being of exceeding length, about the hinder legs of the Elephant, & so staying him, thrusteth his head into his tronke and exhausteth his breath, or else biteth him in the Eare, whereunto he cannot reach with his tronke, and when the Elephant waxeth faint, he falleth downe on the serpent, being now full of blood, and with the poise of his body breaketh him: so that his owne blood with the blood of the Elephant runneth out of him mingled together, which being colde, is congealed into that substance which the Apothecaries call Sanguis Draconis, (that is) Dragons blood, otherwise called Cinnabaris, commonly called Cinoper or Vermilion, which the Painters use in certaine colours." The elephant is polygamous, although, as Lok says, "Plinie and Soline write that elephants use none adulterie. It was thought that the intercourse of the sexes took place every second year, in a honeymoon of five days' length, and that the couples purified themselves in a river before rejoining the herd. Of these nuptial journeys Buffon says, "In their march love seems to precede and modesty to follow them, for they observe the greatest mystery in their amours." To this day the East Africans think that if their wives are unfaithful while they are on an elephant hunt, themselves will be killed or maimed by their quarry. It was a Roman belief that when elephants met a man who had lost his way in the woods they would go gently before him and bring him to a plain path. Sindbad had a kindred experience on his seventh voyage when a herd conducted him to their cemetery so that henceforth "I should forbear to kill them, as now I knew where to get their teeth without inflicting injury on them." It is still widely believed that somewhere in Central Africa, perhaps in a remote valley of the western Sudan, is an elephant graveyard whither all the aged and ailing pachyderms of the continent repair, sometimes traveling thousands of miles in order to die in peace amid the relics of their kind. No elephants dead of natural causes are ever found, tradition avers, and from time to time expeditions have sought the vast riches of this storehouse of mortuary ivory. To the elephant various peoples have accorded royal honors. Akbar, the great Mogul, erected a monument to a favorite elephant, which still stands near the deserted city of Fatephur Sikri; it is a tower seventy-two feet high, studded with hundreds of artificial tusks. At the court of Siam the traditional rank of the chief white elephant has been next to the queen and before the heir-apparent. The chief of the Burmese court herd has the residence and honors of a minister of state. "The king of Pegu," says one of the Hakluyt travelers, "is called the King of the White Elephants. If any other king have one, and will not send it him, he will make warre with him for it; for he had rather lose a great part of his kingdome than not to conquere him." This was history when penned. In the sixteenth century a long war was waged between Pegu, Siam, and Aracan, wherein five kings were killed, in order to obtain possession of one white elephant. These albinos are regarded as an appurtenance of royalty and lack of them is an ill omen. Siam is the Land of the White Elephant. The Rhinoceros The ancients had less to say of the rhinoceros than of the monoceros or unicorn, for which fabulous beast it may have provided the pattern; but they wove legends about the virtues of its horn and its feud with the elephant. Cosmas Indicopleustes wrote that when the rhinoceros walked its horn shook, but that rage tightened it so that the beast was able to uproot trees. Its skin was four fingers thick, and so hard that from it, instead of iron, men made plowshares. In later ages the horn was kept for the cure of diseases and detection of poison. Drinking cups were made of it on a turner's lathe, and the medieval west accepted the tradition of the east that these would sweat at the approach of poison. Horns taken from young bull rhinoceroses which had never coupled with females were preferred. Set in gold and silver, the goblets were an acceptable present for kings. Thunberg was one of the first inquirers to put the superstition to the test by bringing the horn and various poisons together; there was no chemical reaction. The tongue, not the horn, of the rhinoceros was its weapon. of offense, according to old belief. Marco Polo says that this member, in the Sumatran species, is armed with long sharp spines, wherewith, after trampling its enemies, it licks them to death. Pliny has a like story. The Hippopotamus Of the hippopotamus two travelers' tales may be noted. Pliny gives it on hearsay that the river horse enters a cornfield backward, so that there will be no one waiting to waylay it when it comes out. The statement of Father Joano dos Santos in his history of eastern Ethiopia (1506) may best be set down verbatim: "The hippopotamus is naturally of a sickly constitution, and subject to gouty paines, which it cures by scratching the stomach with the left foot; and it has further been noticed, when it wishes to effect a perfect cure that it falls on the horn of the hoof of the left foot; this, entering the stomach, appeases and terminates the pain. Hence the Caffres and Moors make use of this horn as a remedy for the gout." The Hyena The foul countenance and abject gaze of the hyena, its misshapen body, its slinking tread, its affinities with both the wolf and the cat tribes, have been provocative of legend. It lurks in caves and ruins by day, it prowls for carrion food at night, it despoils graveyards of their dead, it roams through unlighted villages, and its howl when excited has a weird note, as of a demon's laughter; so antique fable had much to work upon. "Of prodigious strength," Ctesias called the beast under its Indian name of Krokottas; and, indeed, no animal of its size has jaws so powerful. He credited it with the courage of the lion, the speed of the horse, and the strength of the bull. It imitated the human voice, he said, and, pronouncing their names, called men out at night, when it fell upon and devoured them. "We cannot in the least credit this," is however, the comment of Diodorus Siculus. Pliny, and Solinus after him, thought that the hyena was male one year and female the next-an opinion challenged by Aristotle. It was supposed to carry a stone in its eye which, placed under a man's tongue, would enable him to prophesy. Purchas says the beast "hath no necke joynt, and therefore stirres not his necke but with bending about his whole body." Improving upon Ctesias, he says the animal draws near to sheepcotes at night in order to learn the names of herdsmen, whom afterward it decoys to destruction. Its eyes are "diversified with a thousand colours" and the touch of its shadow "makes a dogge not able to barke." Buffon mentions, only to scout, the notion that the hyena fascinates shepherds so that they cannot move, and renders shepherdesses distracted in love. As a supposed hybrid, Raleigh excludes it from the Ark. A kind of worship is still paid it in East Africa, where the oath of the hyena is administered; it is a crime to kill one and a misdemeanor to mimic its voice. Stories are told of gold rings found in the ears of dead hyenas similar to those worn by sorcerers and workers in iron. The Gnu Near the headwaters of the Nile, according to Pliny, roams the catoblepas, an animal of moderate size and of movements made cumbersome by a head immoderately heavy, which is always bent down toward the earth. This is a fortunate thing, for otherwise "it would prove the destruction of the human race," since "all who behold its eyes fall dead upon the spot.' In this demon-beast of dejected aspect Cuvier recognizes the antelope-gnu, a horned creature apparently compounded of a bison's head, a horse's body, and an antelope's legs; a fantastic and mournful silhouette of the African prairies. The Crocodile The standing of the crocodile in ancient Egypt, and among the savages of the East Indies to this day, has been that of a sacred, or at least a tabooed, animal. It had its own temple at Memphis, where it was worshiped as a divinity, and tame crocodiles took part in the religious processions. The Dyaks of Borneo and the Minangkabauers of Sumatra never kill a crocodile unless it has killed a man. Its privileged position among animals is due to a variety of reasons, of which only three need be noted: it is a dangerous reptile, it flourishes mainly where other food is plenty, and its meat is not agreeable to most palates, having, as Sir Samuel Baker puts it, "the combined flavor of bad fish, rotten flesh, and musk." Such a creature it is both savage superstition and policy to let alone, and even to flatter. The older explanations of crocodile worship are more fantastic. According to Plutarch, this reptile is a symbol of deity because it is the only aquatic animal which has its eyes covered with a thin membrane, so that, like divinity, it sees without being seen. He adds that the Egyptians worship God symbolically in the crocodile, that being the only animal without a tongue, like |