L How The Elephant Got His Trunk

Previous

According to the Just So Stories, in the high and far off times, before any elephant ever had any trunk, there was a certain Elephant’s Child who was afflicted with an insatiable curiosity. And after this Elephant’s Child had been spanked for this same insatiable curiosity by his tall aunt, the Ostrich, and by his tall uncle, the Giraffe, and by his broad aunt, the Hippopotamus, and by his hairy uncle, the Baboon, grievously and frequently, without stopping, for a long time, he started out for the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, to see what the Crocodile has for dinner And the Crocodile caught the Elephant’s Child by the nose, which was just a common nose and not a trunk at all, and pulled and pulled and pulled, being minded to have Elephant’s Child for the beginning of his dinner. And the Elephant’s Child spread out his little four legs, and he pulled and pulled and pulled, until between them, they stretched out the Elephant’s Child’s nose into the first elephant’s trunk that ever was. So all other elephants have had such trunks ever since.

This is Mr. Kipling’s story of how the elephant got his trunk. This and several more like it of the Just So Stories, you must all read for yourselves, for altogether they are about as good stories as have been written by anybody this long time. Besides, something not so very different from this adventure of the Elephant’s Child did really happen. Only it didn’t happen in quite the same way; and instead of there being one Elephant’s Child, there were many, many, many, one after another for hundreds of years, each with a nose a little more stretched out and a little more trunk-like than those which came before it.

So what really happened is something like this: The elephant that you feed peanuts to at the circus, now-a-days, is a strange sort of beast, with his long trunk, his hairless body, his tall legs like the stems of trees, and no front part to his jaws, so that he has only his back teeth. The parents of the elephants that you see were elephants like himself. So were his grand-parents; and their grand-parents in their turn. But if you could go back a very long time, back to the days when the first men appeared in Europe, you would find that the elephants of those days were somewhat more like other four-footed animals. For one thing, they had fur like other animals, while instead of having only four grinding teeth in use at once, they had nearly a full set as most other beasts have. These are the great mastodons and mammoths, whose bones are still dug out of the soil in the United States, in Europe, and in various other parts of the world, and whose bodies have been found frozen in the ice in Siberia, so well preserved that the dogs ate the flesh after they were dug out. There are none of these left alive now, but we still have the pictures of them which men long ago scratched on pieces of bone or sketched on the walls of the caves in which they lived before they knew enough to build houses.

Still older elephant-like creatures, whose bones we still find in the ground, had front teeth, and very long muzzles, longer even than the sharpest nosed dog, as long, let us say, as the bill of a duck, a snipe, or any long-nosed bird. These, of course, had no trunks, but snouts almost as long, with upper and lower jaw, and lips. Then gradually, generation after generation, these long-snouted creatures lost the front part of their jaws and their front teeth and their under lips. They kept two upper front teeth, which grew very large and became tusks. They kept also their long upper lip, without any bones to hold it in place, so that it hung down and became a trunk.

So the elephant’s nose isn’t his nose only, but his nose and his upper lip and part of the roof of his mouth. Next time you go to the circus, you watch the elephant when he lifts his trunk so that you can see the under side, and notice the rough cross markings that other beasts have on the roofs of their mouths, and that you yourselves can see in the mirror or feel on the roof of your own mouth with your tongue. Then, when the elephant opens his mouth to take a peanut, see whether his mouth doesn’t look as if his under lip and the whole front of his jaws had been taken off just as I say it has. But the proof of what I say, is there have been found near Cairo, Egypt, the bones of the original elephant who didn’t have a trunk, but did have a very long snout; and of other elephants besides, the great-great-great-grandchildren of these, and the great-great-great-grandfathers of the mammoths and mastodons, who had begun to lose their long muzzles, and to turn their upper lips into trunks.

It’s the same way with any other animal that is different from the rest; his great-grandfather’s great-grandfather’s great-grandfather many times removed wasn’t nearly so different from other animals as he is. Take for instance, the horse. He is a good deal different from other beasts, with his great size and speed, and his strange single-fingered hand, and his strange single-toed foot, and himself standing up on the nails of his middle fingers and toes.

But out in Wyoming and thereabouts they dig out of the ground the bones of old horses that had their middle finger nails and their middle toe nails, which are their hoofs, considerably smaller than our horses have them; while at the same time, the little splint bones, which are the remnants of the fingers and toes next the middle, are much larger than they are now-a-days. Still deeper in the ground, are the bones of still older horses, which had three hoofs on each foot, but the middle one was largest and the two at the side did not touch the ground, just as they don’t in the deer. These horses were only as large as the smallest ponies.

Lower in the ground, still, come the bones of yet older and smaller horses, with three hoofs on each foot, all about the same size; but the hoof has become more like a regular toe with a nail, about like a pig’s, which are about half way between hoofs and toes. Buried even deeper in the earth are the bones of horses no bigger than large dogs, that look like horses, and yet look something like dogs also, and something like sheep; which have four toes on their front feet, that are real toes, only just beginning to turn into hoofs. Last of all, there are the oldest horses of all, no larger than cats, with four toes on their front feet, and the splint bone belonging to the thumb, with claws like a dog’s that are not hoofs at all, horses that had a tail like a dog’s, and looked almost as much like a dog as like a horse, only it had grinding teeth and ate herbs.

So gradually, one little change at a time, this creature that was almost as much dog as horse, lost one toe after another, increased in size, got up on his toes, and became a modern trotter. At the same time, another animal that looked much like one of these little dog-horses, only he was on the whole a little more like a dog, kept on getting more and more dog-like, with smaller claws and sharper teeth and slenderer nose, till he became something that was neither dog nor wolf nor fox, but a general mixture of all three, with some cat and some hyena thrown in.

They find out in Wyoming, also, the bones of another creature that has been called “the father of cats”—Patriofelis as they say it in Latin. But the father of cats is also a great deal like a seal, and something like an otter—at least he used to take readily to the water, as our modern cats certainly do not.

In short, if any of us had lived in North America at a time not so very long before the first human beings actually did live somewhere on the earth, we should be surely put to it to tell one sort of beast from another. The horses looked like dogs, and the dogs looked like cats, and the cats looked like seals, and there were pigs that looked like wolves, and camels that suggested sheep, to say nothing of cows that you couldn’t tell from deer. Each beast used to be a general mixture of all beasts, and only since there have been men in the world have the beasts changed into all the various sorts which we know.

The snakes used to have legs. In fact, a snake is not much more than a lizard that has left off his legs for the sake of crawling into smaller holes. But the snakes and lizards are much older than the beasts; so that there were plenty of both in the world long before there were horses and cows and dogs and cats and all the rest of the beasts with fur—and still longer, naturally, before there were any elephants or men.

The early birds, too, were a good deal like lizards. They had teeth like a crocodile, and long tails with feathers stuck in the sides, and tho they had wings like a proper bird, they had also claws on their wings, which were really three-fingered hands with feathers growing on them. But even our modern birds still keep the old lizard scales on their legs, tho they have long ago changed them to feathers on their bodies.

It is exactly the same with our own ancestors as with the ancestors of any beast or bird or reptile. The bones of early men are still found in the caves of Europe, mixed with the bones of the animals which they ate, and buried in the earth and stone that have fallen from the roof. These men were true and proper human beings, who walked on their hind legs and, I suppose, talked. But they were not quite such men as we are, for their skulls were a little flatter on top, the bony ridges over their eyes were a little heavier and their teeth a little larger.

These ancient men, like nearly all Indians before White Men came, and for that matter, like our own prehistoric ancestors in Europe, had no metal tools, and used only stone for hammers, axes, and arrowheads. So there are found, all over Europe, vast numbers of stone tools and weapons, cruder as they are older, until the very earliest are only common pebbles that have been banged by use.

No skeletons are known of these early men, but only skulls, commonly a good deal broken. So we do not know very much about these people. But for the most part the hollow in the brain-case is just a trifle larger over the left ear, as if even they had a speech center, were right-handed, and could talk.

On the other hand, some very ancient apes had skulls and teeth more like ours than any modern gorilla or chimpanzee ever has. So it seems to be a general rule that, just as young animals and plants tend to be more like one another than they will be when they grow up, so very ancient creatures tend to be less unlike each other than their present-day descendants are.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Clyx.com


Top of Page
Top of Page