one of which he is moved to gentleness and obedience, by the other to ferocity and resistance.

This legend of the two hearts of the elephant is a striking expression of that duality of the physical nature which seems to distinguish tameable from untameable animals. In an animal of the latter class, whether in its wild state or in captivity, the whole bent of its nature is single and unwavering: it may be crushed by outer violence, but it admits of no internal division, and the influence of man finds no place in the permanent nature of the beast. In the tameable animal, on the contrary, there is an original duality which furnishes a foothold for the power of man: there is one part of the creature's nature that struggles with the other, and thus strangely mimics the moral nature of man, with its conflicts between the higher and the lower principles in him, and like that moral nature, is amenable to the power of rewards and punishments. Look at a dog vacillating between obeying his master's bidding "to heel" and indulging his animal passion for worrying a flock of sheep he seems to be a moral being like man, hesitating between the call of duty and pleasure-between present gratification and future punishment on the one hand, and on the other present self-denial and future reward. The dog no doubt exhibits this quality in the highest degree; but it seems to us that the same thing, in lesser degrees, characterises all animals that are capable of being tamed, and not merely subdued or held in by present force.

:

It is a common observation amongst our naturalists that the bodies of quadrupeds and birds which have died naturally are far less often found than might be expected from the number of the living and the consequent frequency of death. To this observation there are exceptions-such, for instance, as the shrews, whose soft little bodies so often lie across our path. Something, no doubt, is due to the number of animals ready to devour all dead flesh that comes in their way; but from comparing the number of bodies whose death appears due to the gun or other human means with those which appear to have died naturally, we can scarcely doubt that there is some other cause for the phenomenon in question, and that it is probably to be found in a tendency in animals to seek some hiding-place for their last moments.

This observation, which has been so often made with regard to our few and small quadrupeds, is repeated by our author with regard to the larger animals that haunt the forests and glades of Ceylon. The natives assert that the dead body of a monkey is never found in the forest, and they say, "he who has seen a white crow, the nest of a paddy bird, a straight coco-nut

tree, or a dead monkey, is certain to live for ever." The Indians of the continent and the people at Gibraltar have the same piece of folk lore about dead monkeys.

With the elephants in Ceylon the same is to be observed: the Singhalese assert that the dead body of one is seldom or never to be discovered in the woods; and English and Singhalese who have frequented the forest agree in declaring that they have never found the remains of an elephant that had died a natural death.* The natives account for this by declaring that the herd bury the bodies of their dead companions; and there seems some evidence that when dead bodies have been left in a corral, they are removed in a way which would appear to be attributable to no other agency than that of the herd entering the enclosure after it has been left by the hunters. The Singhalese have further the belief-a beautiful notion if nothing more, of which our author finds evidence in the story of Sinbad the Sailor-that there is some spot to which the elephants come to die. The spot, however, is so mysteriously concealed that no one has ever penetrated to it; one of the natives seems to have asserted it to be far away in the north, near the ruined city of Anarajapoora, another amongst the mountains to the east of Adam's Peak: in fact, nobody but Sinbad seems ever to have been there.

We have all heard the saying about nobody's ever having seen a dead donkey, and the witty reason that is given for itbecause they live so long; but we never expected to see such a reason gravely adduced in such a book as that before us. But our author, after having spoken of the age to which elephants are supposed to live, goes on to say, "it is perhaps from this popular belief of their almost illimitable age that the natives generally assert that the body of a dead elephant is seldom or never to be discovered in the woods." This is too bad. natives, as we have seen, give two very sufficient reasons for their belief; and why in the world should they have foisted upon them such an Irish reason which they themselves never hint at? and this, too, when no one even suggests that the Singhalese are emigrants from Miletus.

The

Snake-charming has been apparently, ever since scriptural times, one of the peculiarities and one of the mysteries of the East. If there be any magical influence by which it is accomplished, it is perhaps only to be attained by the solemn and mystical nature of the oriental; but there is reason to believe that it merely consists, as our author supposes, in taking skilful advantage of the timidity of the snake.

When he tells us, moreover, that the poisonous cobra di Vol. ii. p. 398.

+ Ibid.

capello may be rendered so tame as to be used as watch-dogs are in this country, to protect property, without danger to its owner, we may almost infer that a process of taming may be all that is necessary for the purpose of the supposed charmer. Doubtless many of our readers remember the Arab snakecharmer, whose feats at the Zoological Gardens in the Regent's Park attracted some notice a few years ago; these, which were somewhat disappointing from their monotony and the calm grace with which they were performed (giving more the idea of a piece of elaborate clock-work than of the motions of living figures), seemed much like the result of mere taming; but perhaps this was scarcely a fair specimen of the art.

The danger to be apprehended from snakes does not seem to be great in Ceylon; as Sir Emerson Tennent considers that there are but few poisonous reptiles in the country, and that even these are so fearful of man that by warning them of your approach, as the natives do, by means of a slight noise, the probability of receiving a wound from one of them is very small. Even this event, however, is not considered fatal by the Singhalese, who carry about their persons a "snake-stone," as it is called, to whose efficacy our author bears witness; though neither he nor Professor Faraday, to whose experiments he submitted it, can explain the way in which it is rendered so porous as instantly to absorb the infected blood, and thus draw it from the wound. It is said that the secret of the manufacture of these snake-stones is possessed by the monks of Manilla, whence they are imported to India. The substance of which they are made is light, black, and porous, and resembles charred bone.

The great heat of Ceylon has enabled Sir Emerson Tennent to observe and contribute many facts which show that in tropical countries the sun burns frore, and that great heat produces both on animal and vegetable life similar effects to great cold. English fruit-trees have been introduced into Ceylon, but with a result which illustrates forcibly the need to the plants of our climate of the profound and deathlike repose of our winter; for the peaches, cherries, and other European fruit-trees, which grow freely in certain parts of the island, not only become evergreens, but, wanting the winter and exhausted by a perpetual summer, they refuse to ripen their fruit; the trees have, as our gardeners would say, no time to rest. In the case of the vine, however, this rest has been successfully supplied by Mr. Dyke, the government agent at Jaffna, by baring the roots and exposing them to the sun about the time of pruning in July. This exposure to the heat produced the beneficial effect of the cold of a European winter; it arrested the circulation of the sap, gave the

* Vol. i. p. 89.

vines the needful rest, and the grapes, which before dropped almost unformed, are now brought to thorough maturity.*

So, again, with regard to the animals of Ceylon, many of them exhibit the phenomenon known to naturalists as æstivation, being the torpor of summer as hybernation is the torpor of winter; and, as our author has shown, strikingly confirm the opinion of Dr. John Hunter, that hybernation is not an immediate consequence of cold, but is attributable to that want of food and other essentials caused by cold, and against which nature makes a provision by the suspension of her functions, and thus of the need for these otherwise essential conditions of life. The crocodiles of the Mississippi are imprisoned by frost; those of Ceylon and South America by force of the heat betake themselves to the clay beneath the subsiding waters, and there pass their time, no doubt in torpid sleep, till the rains return and arouse them to activity. The English snail retires from the winter's cold into the earth or hollows; the snails of Ceylon cover themselves in and retire to inactivity during the summer. The fish of northern regions are capable of being frozen and of again returning to life; and similarly, the fishes of Ceylon are able to bury themselves in the indurated mud, and revive to life when the rains of the monsoons again fill the tanks and pools with water. The capacity of several fish thus to bury themselves during periods of drought is well known to naturalists; but the confirmatory facts which our author has collected are both curious and valuable. In the portions of the country where small tanks are numerous, the fish are so abundant as to induce the natives to fish by the strange method of digging in the mud, "non cum hamis sed cum dolabra ire piscatum;" and Sir Emerson Tennent has figured in the present work an anabas which he procured through the agency of the Modliar of Matura, and which was taken, along with several others, from the depth of a foot and a half in the mud of a tank from which the water had dried up.

Whether this capacity of certain fish to bury themselves and maintain a suspended vitality is sufficient to account for the fact of the reappearance in the tanks of full-grown fish a few days after the rains set in, or whether we must look for some other or additional explanation, seems open to question. Whatever be the cause or causes, the fact seems beyond doubt that the great reservoirs and tanks of the island are twice in every year liable to be dried up, till the mud at the bottom is turned into dust, and the clay cleft into gaping apertures; yet that within a very few days after the change in the monsoon, the waters are again peopled with full-grown fishes, and the naVol. i. p. 89; ii. p. 539.

tives are busily at work catching them in their funnel-shaped baskets.

The book before us often suggests the reflection, that if enlarged travel and the researches of modern science make us reject many of the tales that once found acceptance, they have, in other directions, enlarged our powers of credence; so that now we unhesitatingly take as facts many things which a few generations back would have held merely as travellers' tales, told only to enhance the interest of their narratives, or to magnify their own experiences in the eyes of stay-at-home readers. The pretty little lizards that climb about the walls of Ceylon houses, which, if seized, have the power of retreating safely home, only, like the sheep of the nursery rhyme, "leaving their tails behind them,' and gradually producing a duplicate of the captured member; the musical fish (if fish they be) that make soft melody like a mermaid's singing, when the moon is at the full, in Batticaloa Bay; those that migrate over land in flocks in search of water, or stranger still, those that have been known to fall from the sky in showers; the skilful weaver-bird, which supplies his singular nest with night-lights in the shape of fire-flies jammed up against his walls in mud sconces, -these, and numerous other wonders, savour so much of the marvellous that in former times they would hardly have gained credence.

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In these pages we have only considered Sir Emerson Tennent's work so far as it relates to the natural history of the interesting island with which, fortunately for literature and science, he was placed in official connection. But this valuable work is not less interesting in the other departments which it embraces; and we cordially recommend it to all who are anxious or willing to learn something more than is generally known of the past history and present condition of the far-famed Taprobane.