nblinks

[email fragment] The Astonishing Elephant has a nice chapter on the elephant in history. Evidently the first elephants in Europe were four brought back from India by Alexander the Great as a gift for his old teacher Aristotle, who wrote about them in his "History of Animals":

The elephant is said by some to live for about two hundred years; by others, for three hundred. (Book VII, Part 9)

Astonishing Elephant also says that Roman sources include descriptions of both African and Indian elephants (I think the differentiating feature being the number of nose-fingers). Also, it says that neither African nor Asian elephants can be truly tamed -- every few years even the Asian ones are supposed to need to head off into the forest for a while before coming back to their mahouts. Otherwise they go crazy and squash people. Speaking of which, have you been out to Coney Island to see the memorial they just put up in honor of the first elephant to be executed by electrocution?