rates it by quotations from Suetonius, Pliny, and the Historia
Augusta, showing that it was the custom to erect to Emperors and
Empresses statues of elephants drawing triumphal chariots.]

'This is to be much regretted, that whereas these animals live in the
flesh more than a thousand years, their brazen effigies should be so
soon crumbling away. See therefore that their gaping limbs be
strengthened by iron hooks, and that their drooping bellies be
fortified by masonry placed underneath them.

[Sidenote: Natural history of the elephant.]

'The living elephant, when it is prostrate on the ground, as it often
is when helping men to fell trees, cannot get up again unaided. This
is because it has no joints in its feet; and accordingly you see
numbers of them lying as if dead till men come to help them up again.
Thus this creature, so terrible by its size, is really not equally
endowed by Nature with the tiny ant.

'That the elephant surpasses all other animals in intelligence is
proved by the adoration which it renders to Him whom it understands to
be the Almighty Ruler of all. Moreover it pays to good princes a
homage which it refuses to tyrants.

'It uses its proboscis[696], that nosed hand which Nature has given it
to compensate for its very short neck, for the benefit of its master,
accepting the presents which will be profitable to him. It always
walks cautiously, mindful of that fatal fall [into the hunter's pit]
which was the beginning of its captivity. At its master's bidding it
exhales its breath, which is said to be a remedy for the human
headache.

[Footnote 696: Cassiodorus calls it 'promuscis.']

'When it comes to water it sucks up in its trunk a vast quantity,
which at the word of command it squirts forth like a shower. If anyone
have treated it with contempt, it pours forth such a stream of dirty
water over him that one would think a river had entered his house. For
this beast has a wonderfully long memory, both of injury and of
kindness. Its eyes are small, but move solemnly. There is a sort of
kingly dignity in its appearance, and while it recognises with
pleasure all that is honourable, it seems to despise scurrilous jests.
Its skin is furrowed by deep channels, like that of the victims of the
foreign disease named after it[697], _elephantiasis_. It is on account
of the impenetrability of this hide that the Persian Kings used the
elephant in war.

[Footnote 697: 'A qua transportaneorum (?) nefand