against a rock if more convenient.  In my rides through the northern forests, the natives of Ceylon have often pointed out that the elephants which had preceded me must have been of considerable size, from the height at which their marks had been left on the trees against which they had been rubbing.  Not unfrequently the animals themselves, overcome with drowsiness from the night’s gambolling, are found dosing and resting against the trees they had so visited, and in the same manner they have been discovered by sportsmen asleep, and leaning against a rock.

It is scarcely necessary to explain that the position is accidental, and that it is taken by the elephant not from any difficulty in lying at length on the ground, but rather from the coincidence that the structure of his legs affords such support in a standing position, that reclining scarcely adds to his enjoyment of repose; and elephants in a state of captivity have been known for months together to sleep without lying down.[1] So distinctive is this formation, and so self-sustaining the configuration of the limbs, that an elephant shot in the brain, by Major Rogers in 1836, was killed so instantaneously that it died literally on its knees, and remained resting on them.  About the year 1826, Captain Dawson, the engineer of the great road to Kandy, over the Kaduganava pass, shot an elephant at Hangwelle on the banks of the Kalany Ganga; it remained on its feet, but so motionless, that after discharging a few more balls, he was induced to go close to it, and found it dead.

[Footnote 1:  So little is the elephant inclined to lie down in captivity, and even after hard labour, that the keepers are generally disposed to suspect illness when he betakes himself to this posture.  PHILE, in his poem De Animalium Proprietate, attributes the propensity of the elephant to sleep on his legs, to the difficulty he experiences in rising to his feet: 

    [Greek: 
    ’Orthostaden de kai katheudei panychos
    ’HOt ouk anastesai men eucheros pelei.]

But this is a misapprehension.]

The real peculiarity in the elephant in lying down is, that he extends his hind legs backwards as a man does when he kneels, instead of bringing them under him like the horse or any other quadruped.  The wise purpose of this arrangement must be obvious to any one who observes the struggle with which the horse gets up from the ground, and the violent efforts which he makes to raise himself erect.  Such an exertion in the case of the elephant, and the force requisite to apply a similar movement to raise his weight (equal to four or five tons) would be attended with a dangerous strain upon the muscles, and hence the simple arrangement, which by enabling him to draw the hind feet gradually under him, assists him to rise without a perceptible effort.

The same construction renders his gait not a “gallop,” as it has been somewhat loosely described[1], which would be too violent a motion for so vast a body; but a shuffle, that he can increase at pleasure to a pace as rapid as that of a man at full speed, but which he cannot maintain for any considerable distance.