the life which these beasts live--moving,
thinking and sleeping in a circumambient atmosphere of never-ceasing
sound; sitting, as it were, at the receiving station of a system of
wireless telegraphy, and catching cross-currents of floating
intelligence from all quarters, mostly undiscernible by us if we
listened for it, but which they, by long practice, instantly locate and
interpret without conscious effort.

The zoologist classifies them under many heads. The field mouse and
rabbits are rodentia, the deer ungulata, the kangaroos marsupialia. In
my museum they are all one family, and their labels are their ears. In
these days of international conferences, parliaments of religion,
pan-everything-in-turn councils, might we not arrange for a great
catholic congress of distinguished ears? What a glow of new life it
would shed upon our straitened, traditional ways of thinking about the
social problems of our humble fellow-creatures! I would exclude the
eared owls, whose ears are a mere sport of fashion, like the hideous
imitations of birds' wings which ladies stick on their hats.

But just when this peep into the rare show of Nature is lifting my soul
into sublimity, I am brought down to the base earth again by an
exception. This is the plague of all high science. You design a stately
theory, collect from many quarters a wealth of facts to establish it
with, and have arranged them with cumulative and irresistible force,
when some disgusting, uninvited case thrusts itself in on your notice
and refuses to fit into your argument at all. In this instance it is
"my lord the elephant." That he has no need to concern himself about any
bloodthirsty beast that may be lurking in the jungle is not more obvious
than that his ears are the biggest in the world. Now there are two ways
of getting rid of an obstruction of this kind. One is to betake yourself
to your thinking chair and pipe and to rake up the possibilities of the
Pleiocene and Meiocene ages, and prove that when the immense ear of the
elephant was evolved there must have been some carnivorous monster, some
sabre-toothed tiger or cave bear, which preyed on elephants.

The other way is to get acquainted with the elephant, cultivate an
intimacy with him, and find out what his ears are to him. I prefer the
second way. I would patiently watch him as he stands drowsily under an
umbrageous banian tree on a sultry day before the monsoon has burst and
refreshed earth and air. So mig