With the exception of the narrow but densely inhabited belt of cultivated land, that extends along the seaborde of the island from Chilaw on the western coast to Tangalle on the south-east, there is no part of Ceylon in which elephants may not be said to abound; even close to the environs of the most populous localities of the interior.  They frequent both the open plains and the deep forests; and their footsteps are to be seen wherever food and shade, vegetation and water[1], allure them, alike on the summits of the loftiest mountains, and on the borders of the tanks and lowland streams.

[Footnote 1:  M. AD.  PICTET has availed himself of the love of the elephant for water, to found on it a solution of the long-contested question as to the etymology of the word “elephant,"-a term which, whilst it has passed into almost every dialect of the West, is scarcely to be traced in any language of Asia.  The Greek [Greek:  elephas], to which we are immediately indebted for it, did not originally mean the animal, but, as early as the time of Homer, was applied only to its tusks, and signified ivory.  BOCHART has sought for a Semitic origin, and seizing on the Arabic fil, and prefixing the article al, suggests alfil, akin to [Greek:  eleph]; but rejecting this, BOCHART himself resorts to the Hebrew eleph, an “ox”—­and this conjecture derives a certain degree of countenance from the fact that the Romans, when they obtained their first sight of the elephant in the army of Pyrrhus, in Lucania, called it the Luca bos.  But the [Greek:  antos] is still unaccounted for; and POTT has sought to remove the difficulty by introducing the Arabic hindi, Indian, s thus making eleph-hindi, “bos Indicus.”  The conversion of hindi into [Greek:  antos] is an obstacle, but here the example of “tamarind” comes to aid; tamar hindi, the “Indian date,” which in mediaeval Greek forms [Greek:  tamarenti].  A theory of Benary, that helhephas might be compounded of the Arabic al, and ibha, a Sanskrit name for the elephant, is exposed to still greater etymological exception.  PICTET’S solution is, that in the Sanskrit epics “the King of Elephants,” who has the distinction of carrying the god Indra, is called airarata or airavana, a modification of airavanta, “son of the ocean,” which again comes from iravat, “abounding in water.”  “Nous aurions done ainsi, comme correlatif du gree [Greek:  elephanto], une ancienne forme, airavanta ou ailavanta, affaiblie plus tard en airavata ou airavana....  On connait la predilection de l’elephant pour le voisinage des fleuves, et son amour pour l’eau, dont l’abondance est necessaire a son bien-etre.”  This Sanskrit name, PICTET supposes, may have been carried to the West by the Phoenicians, who were the purveyors of ivory from India; and, from the Greek, the Latins derived elephas, which passed into the modern languages