The ease with which the elephant is taught to perform the most difficult feats forms a remarkable contrast to its huge size and clumsiness. Aristotle tells us that in ancient times elephants were taught by their keepers to throw stones at a mark, to cast up arms in the air, and catch them again on their fall; and to dance, not merely on the earth, but on the rope. The first, according to the historian Suetonius, who exhibited elephant rope dancers, was Galba at Rome. The manner of teaching them to dance on the ground was simple enough (simply music and a very hot floor); but we are not told how they were taught to skip the rope, or whether it was the tight or the slack rope, or how high the rope was. The silence of history on these points is fortunate for the dancers of the present day; since, but for this, their fame might have been utterly eclipsed. Elephants may, in the days of old Rome, have been taught to dance on a rope, but when was an elephant ever known to skip on a rope over the heads of an audience, or to caper amidst a blaze of fire fifty feet aloft in the air? What would Aristotle have thought of his dancing elephants if he had seen some of the elephants who perform to-day?