yrrhus and those known to
Alexander were the Indian, though they were taken in those days much
to the West of India, namely, in Mesopotamia, and it would not have
been difficult for the Carthaginians to convey Indian elephants, which
had certainly been brought as far as Egypt, along the Mediterranean
coast. An unfounded prejudice as to the want of docility of the
African elephant has favoured the notion that the Carthaginians used
the Indian elephant. As a matter of fact, no one in modern times has
tried to train the African elephant, except here and there in a
zoological garden. Probably the Indian "mahout," or elephant trainer
could, if he were put to it, do as much with an African as he does
with an Indian elephant. It would be an interesting experiment. In the
next place, there is decisive evidence that it was the African
elephant which the Carthaginians used, since we have a Carthaginian
coin (Fig. 7) on which is beautifully represented--in unmistakable
modelling--the African elephant, with his large triangular cape-like
ears and his sloping forehead. In the time of Hannibal there were
stables for over 300 of these elephants at Carthage, and he took fifty
with him to the South of France with his army for the Italian
invasion. He only got thirty-seven safely over the Rhone, and all but
a dozen or so died in the terrible passage of the Alps. After the
battle of Trebia he had only eight left, and when he had crossed the
Apennines there was only one still alive. On this Hannibal himself
rode.

Since the period when the white chalk which now forms our cliffs and
hills was deposited at the bottom of a vast and deep ocean--the sea
bottom has been raised, the chalk has emerged and risen on the top of
hills to 800 feet in height in our own islands, and to ten times that
height elsewhere, and during that process sands and clays and shelly
gravels have been deposited to the thickness of some 2,800 feet by
seas and estuaries and lakes, which have come and gone on the face of
Europe and of other parts of the world as it has slowly sunk and
slowly risen again. The last 200 feet or so of deposits we call the
Pleistocene or Quaternary; the rest are known as the Tertiary strata.
They are only a small part of the total thickness of aqueous deposit
of stratified rock--which amounts to 60,000 feet more before the
earliest remains of life in the Cambrian beds are reached, whilst
older than, and therefore below this, we have another 50