The menageries : quadrupeds, described and drawn from living subjects.

Date:
1831
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The menageries : quadrupeds, described and drawn from living subjects. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Even iii the time of Justinian (a. n. 527), the elephant was rarely shewn either at Rome or Con- stantinople *. D uring the middle ages, little or nothing was known of the elephant, except through the inaccurate representations of the animal upon medals. The figure of the elephant was used, too, in heraldry, with a tower on his back. When the arts were little practised in England the representation was rude enough ; as may be seen on an ancient plate in St. Mary’s Hall, at Coventry : and, probably, from this in- accuracy of form, the multitude, with the common disposition to burlesque, converted the “ Elephant and Castle” into “ the Pig and Whistle.” Up to the time of the revival of letters, and indeed till the end of the sixteenth century, the people of Italy, whose ancestors had been so familiar with this quadruped, accounted all that was said about his sagacity as a fable, and had no idea of his form, ex- cept as to its vastness f. Rut the growing intercourse of the moderns with distant countries, and the spirit of curiosity which more particularly belongs to com- mercial nations, gradually rendered the elephant a somewhat common object in most large collections of foreign animals—at least after the Portuguese had penetrated to the interior of Africa, and the discovery of the passage to India had gradually led to the es- tablishment of European settlements in the East. In this way the French king had an elephant at Versailles, which came from Congo, and which died in 1081 J. Thamas Kouli Khan, in 1741, sent * See Cuper de Elephantis ; in Novas Thesaurus Antiquitatum Romanorum, congestus ab. A. H. de Sallengre, t. iii.p. 248.— 1719. f Pierius, Hierogl. lib. ii. cap. 18; quoted in Sallengre. j Pcrrault, Memoires pour servir a. l’histoire Naturelle des AnimaiiX; tom. ii. p. 503.
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