And every smile is known.
We thank thee, thou Titan train,
That in the city once again,
  We clasp our loved, our own!

THE ELEPHANT AT HOME.

THE superficial narratives of sportsmen have
made us familiar with the obvious features of
Ceylon. There is nobody able to read, who has
not read about its Adam's Peak, its Buddhism,
and its Elephants.  An English Government
officer, long resident in the island, Sir JAMES
EMERSON TENNENT, has been giving his mind to a
thorough, minute, and comprehensive study of it.
He happens to be the first man who has done
so, and his newly published volumes on Ceylon,
compared with all that came before them, afford
one of the most striking instances that can be
shown in literature, of the difference—not merely
of degree, but the essential difference—between
cursory notice and intimate acquaintance.  Sir
James Emerson Tennent is a most admirable
observer, a highly intelligent and cultivated
writer.  Nor can any one read his volumes
with any care, and fail to respect in their
author, a gentle and an amiable man.  In
aid of his vast stock of materials, he brings an
enjoyment of them, tempered at once by a sense
of responsibility, and by an ease and modesty,
which completely win the reader.  And it is good
and reassuring to know that such a man was in
the public service when he saw so much to such
good purpose, and is in it still.  Such a public
officer, no matter what his degree, does as much
(we are inclined to think) as all Downing-street
in making our Government respected abroad,
wherever Letters and the Arts are cared for.

A thoroughly fresh study of the elephants has
been part of this author's labour. The book
contains a great deal of new information about
these great fellows, corrects errors as old as
history, shows us the elephant at home; not as
the sportsman sees him driven from his haunts,
angered or terrified, but as the quiet observer
comes upon him in the placid shades that he
frequents, fanning himself, fidgeting his legs
gracefully, and deliberately beating the earth
out of the mouthful of grass he means to eat, or
sporting at night with his brethren in the tank,
and scampering off at the mere crack of a
snapped twig.  New talk about old friends will
be always welcome; therefore, with Sir James
Emerson Tennent's book open at our side, let the
discourse be now of elephants.

We fancy that we know already a great deal
about them, and yet the most careful reading
and the amplest observation only assure doubt
as to the meaning of one of their most evident
features.  Why have they tusks?  Nobody
really knows.  A civilised man touches ivory
every day of his life.  The annual importation
of ivory into Great Britain is one million of
pounds, and the average weight of a tusk being
about sixty pounds, eight or nine thousand
elephants are slaughtered every year to supply
Britain alone with the ivory used in her arts and
manufactures.  Very little of this comes from
Ceylon, because in Ceylon only one
elephant in a hundred, and that always a male,
has tusks.  From his tusks part of the
ivory goes to China, and the finest specimens
are eagerly collected by the Buddhist priests
upon the spot, for ornament of private dwellings
and of temples.  Had the Ceylon elephants
been tusked as they are in Africa and India,
they would, by this time, have been extirpated.
In Africa, both sexes of elephants have tusks,
and so they have in India; although there, the
tusks of females are much smaller than those of
the males.  All the untusked elephants of Ceylon
have "tushes," about a foot long and an inch or
two in thickness, which they use in snapping
off small branches and climbing plants. There is
a reason for these differences; but what is it?

Some say that in Ceylon there is plenty of
water, but that the elephants in Africa need
some natural implement for digging wells.  The
tusk that, where it exists, never grows beyond a
weight of sixty pounds in Ceylon, sometimes
attains in Africa to the weight of one hundred
and fifty, two hundred, or even, according to
the statement of Mr. Broderip, in his Zoological
Recreations, three hundred and fifty pounds.
But if the elephant has tusks to dig with, why
is the female elephant denied equal provision
with the male?

Again, it is said that the tusks of the elephant
are weapons. But their position is almost
vertical, under a head not easily raised above the
level of the shoulder.  It is only by accident
that an effectual blow could be dealt with them.
The chances are in favour of a man, even when
he has fallen underneath an elephant enraged
against him, so little is the harmless creature apt
for war.  In his forest he is without enemies.
His food abounds, and his pursuits bring him
into conflict with one living creature only, and
that is the fly.  Except the fly, an elephant has
no antagonist among irrational beings.  In
Ceylon, where there is a population of a million
and a half, where elephants abound and are
much worried by hunters, three fatal accidents
in a year is the average loss of human life to be
set down to their account.  If an elephant does
get an enemy between his feet, he trusts to
crush him by his weight, and has a power of
tossing the body from foot to foot, that he may
stamp upon it with each foot in turn. Two
Ceylon elephants, one of them a tusher, were
once seen in combat in the forest.  The elephant
without tusks wound his trunk about one of the
tusks of his antagonist and snapped from it a
fragment two feet long.  The trunk was
stronger than the tusk as an offensive weapon.
Again, the state elephants, who were trained as
executioners by former kings of Kandy, held the
criminal under one foot while they plucked off
his limbs by sudden movements of the trunk.
Use of the tusks never occurred to them.

A physiologist writing upon the appendages
of animals, regards elephant's tusks as "a
species of safety-valve of the animal economy,"
the necessity for which arises from the remarkable