" JTJMBO."
THE explosion of friendship for "Jumbo," the great African elephant in the Zoological Gardens, which marked the London newspapers of Tuesday, though a little grotesque in form, was not unprecedented, and not altogether unreasonable. Londoners have an instinct for pets, and have not infrequently made pets of single animals at the Zoological. It would be a good deal less dangerous for a rough to hurt a human being than to hurt the big seal, who, with his grave face and kindly reflective eyed, is regarded by half the visitors and all children as a personal friend of unusual but extremely cleanly and in- teresting habits. Friendship for a hippopotamus is, perhaps, not possible, for whenever he gapes—and he is a victim to chronic ennui—he opens his jaws "at twice," the second movement revealing the whole throat, and any proce- dure so unusual as that is, of course, fatal to true friend- ship—one could not be friendly with a man who could take off his head and replace it—but still, there is an interest in the hippopotamus which was once intense. It would have been highly dangerous to throw pennies or nails into his month, at the time when Leech—we think it was Leech —was making all London laugh with his picture of the huge brute as a lapdog led by a string by a lady, who says, " Come along, Fido ! " Why that picture is so irresistible is an in- tellectual puzzle, but the man who can resist it stands confessed a Scotchman, and would declare that he saw nothing comic in an owl, nothing sinister in a raven when his head is on one side, and he has that look of knowing something about your future which you ought to know, but never will. The permanent London appreciation of Mr. Buckland rose to fever-heat when he secured that porpoise, and a good many Londoners still are half-resentful of Thackeray's exquisitely humourons dirge, and the glee of the sturgeon at the demise of the " big, black, blundering, blubbery beast." As to the elephants, they are all friends of the public, if only because they can be fed, and among them " Jumbo " in particular is the friend, for a very natural reason. He alone realizes the popular ideal. It is not to be denied that interesting as every elephant is and must be—being the only beast whose nose is as long as an arm, and as efficient as a hand —most elephants, and especially most Indian elephants, disap- point the public as much as the Atlantic Ocean is said to have disappointed. Mr. Oscar Wilde. There is so little of them. The public, deceived partly by pictures, and partly by the very remarkable disparities existing among elephants, expects a mountain of flesh, and on seeing an animal only half as large again as a bull, feels as deceived as when it goes to see a giant, and finds only a meek and weak-kneed life-guardsman, and almost asks for its money back. It regards the elephants as the sight of the Zoological, and wants its children to be not only amazed, but a little alarmed. "It 'ud weigh," remarked a meditative butcher of one Indian beast, " but 'taint so big as I thought." " Jumbo" is as big. Belonging to the big African species, and probably sprang from an aristocratic family with a tendency to body, caught young, and therefore sufficiently fed— a wild elephant rarely gets quite enough to eat —he has de- veloped in his early adolescence into an amazing, almost portentous, beast. There is no elephant like him in Europe, and, we imagine, very few indeed like him anywhere, certainly not in the greatest collections in the world,—the elephant kheddahs maintained by the Government of India. He is, though probably not quite full grown, nearly twelve feet high, a height our readers will realise if they glance up to their own ceiling, and reflect where the back of the elephant would be, and remember how big a dray-horse twice his usual height would look. Outside his den," Jumbo" gives the impression of a moving
mountain, makes raw spectators gape with content and a sense of gratified ideals, and inspires in children a feeling that to mount him is a feat of heroism to be recounted even in after- life. They are delighted with him after they get down, for they feel they have done something brave and risky, and if they had ever seen "Jumbo" in the tunnel with a loaded waggon passing overhead, they would be confirmed in that impression. Unless they take to whaling, he is the biggest living thing they are ever likely to touch or see.
Have not the Managers of the Gardens been a little hasty in selling such a beast? We think nothing of the children's letters to the papers, though they are very natural, for New York children want amusement and instruction as much as Londoners, . nor mach of the complaint that" Jumbo " would evidently rather stay. So would the grand bull of ducal pedigree who goes next week to Australia, and the grander mare who came last week from Tunis, and had, perhaps, lived in a tent half her life ; and so also would conscripts, naval officers, and Cetewayo. One must subordinate private feelings of that kind to the general good, and it is for elephants' general good that they should be greatly sought after and fetch high prices and draw great crowds, and so justify careful feeding, good treatment, and generous keep, otherwise their only destiny would be knife-handles. But still, have not the Managers of the Gardens been a little hasty ? They know their own business, and are compelled, in the interest of their collection, to husband their resources ; but, nevertheless, they occupy public ground, and always acknowledge a respon- sibility to the public for their general management. Is it wise to send away from England a specimen which, in all human probability, will never be replaced? Elephants are perishing with extraordinary rapidity. The late Mr. Blyth, the celebrated naturalist of Calcutta, had, we remem- ber, a theory that owing to food difficulties, the rate of multiplication of elephants would grow slower ; but,deven if he was wrong, the beasts are hunted down after a fashion which, as the price of ivory increases, becomes more merciless every year. Mr. Gibson, in his paper on the elephant, in the " En- cyclopaadia Britannica," says that England alone consumes 1,200,000 lb. of ivory a year, to obtain which 30,000 elephants must be slain, and estimates the annual destruction, in all parts of the world, at 100,000 beasts. The beast breeds slowly in the jungle, and not at all in confinement, even in his own climate, though two unexplained exceptions have occurred in America, and it is nearly certain that in another century, when " Jumbo " has arrived at a green old age— elephants are believed to live 150 years, and certainly live above 130—the animal will, with the exception of the few in confinement, have totally ceased to exist. There are not, and will not be, 10,000,000 elephants to supply the century's de- mand, while every rise in the price of ivory and every improve- ment in communication will increase the severity of the hunt. When " Jumbo " is alone in the world, as he very possibly will be, he will be worth thousands, and be for naturalists an object of almost as much interest as a moa, or that gigantic bird, believed to be still alive in Madagascar, whose egg would hold a hat. It is a pity, in the interest of science as well as of the Gardens, to send him away.
We see it stated in the Pall Mall Gazette, apparently upon Mr. Bartlett's authority, and in a letter from Dr. Sclater, Secretary to the Society, that " Jumbo " is getting dangerous, so dangerous that for a year or two he could not be kept in London. Mr. Bartlett's authority is very great; but does he mean that "Jumbo " will kill himself in his fury, or what is the other danger ? The Managers are not bound to let him loose among the crowds Dr. Sclater speaks of. That the male elephant, once fully grown, is liable for a year or two to fits of mad fury, and that for two months in every year he is as dangerous as any other wild beast, are admitted facts, true alike of his wild and his confined state ; but unless he is danger- ous to himself, it must be as possible to keep him in London as in New York. There are ways of hobbling him, well known in the great kheddahs, which will reduce the danger from a rush to a minimum ; and his house can be strengthened to any required point, if it be only by stretching walls of strong rope- net between him and the sides of his room. Is it quite impos- sible to give him an embanked paddock, covered at one corner, or is it only too expensive P The Society might surely waste a little money on a beast which in forty or fifty more years will be irreplaceable and incomparable, and expensive as he is to keep, an extra penny for seeing him would compensate them
for almost any outlay. The occasional danger to a keeper would exist in New York as well as in London, and the Society are not bound during the dangerous period to let children ride on " Jumbo's " back, or even to let him out among the public at all. He is not imagined, we suppose, though we see a hint of the kind in one paper, to be much more malignant than other elephants ; and, indeed, that question of malignity is very far from settled. That an elephant is not the gentle brute he is often supposed to be, may be taken as proved ; as also that, like the bull, he is subject to fits of un- accountable and extremely violent rage, during which he will attack any man or beast he sees ; while he has a certain liability to what we must call insanity not known to exist in any other animal. The " rogue " elephant, a solitary and dan- gerous beast, expelled from every herd, and absolutely hostile, is a known phenomenon of every hunting district. It is evident, too, that the elephant is never domesticated, like the bull or the horse, but remains always half wild ; for if he were not, he would breed in confinement, and we should have, as in the case of modern cattle and horses, not a subjugated beast, but a beast who bad been for generations and ages tame. But Mr. Charles Reade's theory, iu support of which he collected so many cases, that the elephant has a permanent hostility to man, only suppressed by terror, is still at variance with much evidence. 'I he elephant will walk through a crowd, harming nobody, will for years obey orders, and shows distinct affection for those who feed him. It is true he kills his mahout very often —so often, that in the Indian service a mahout's widow has special terms of pension—but then the mahout, to be just to the beast, must be not a little provoking. It cannot be pleasant to have a three-cornered piece of steel about two pounds in weight dug perpetually into your head as you walk, even though the digger does bring you your dinner. The operation may not be much worse than spurring, but it looks so, and it is the sole method both of urging and guiding, which sparring is not. We imagine, on the evidence, that the elephant is rather an uncertain-tempered beast, with the tendency to lunacy which bright wits have, rather than permanently malig- nant. Anyhow, " Jumbo " is no worse than another, and as he is the only captive young elephant in the world who looks as big as he is expected to do, and as he may survive all his kind; he ought, if it is now possible, to be kept here. That is his own opinion too, expressed, like all elephant opinions, with a certain massiveness, not to say majesty of style.
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