VII.—The Sumatran Elephant. By Prof. H. Schlegel.
[The following translation from the Dutch, of a paper read by Prof. H. Schlegel, before the Royal Academy of Sciences of Holland,[1] gives some further details respecting the Sumatran Elephant. This species was distinguished by Temminck some years ago, from the Elephant of Continental India, and proposed to be called Elephas sumatranus,[2] but is hardly known to Naturalists of this country, except from the short notice of it communicated by the late Prince Charles Bonaparte, to one of the meetings of the Zoological Society of London, in 1849.[3]— P. L. S.]
It is well known that Sumatra is the only island of the Indian Archipelago, where Elephants are found wild. Magelhaens has informed us, that the Elephants which he saw in Borneo, were introduced there, and that the animal is as little indigenous to that island as to Java.
So long as all living Elephants were treated of as belonging to one species, no one thought of comparing them together; and even after Cuvier had pointed out that the Elephant of Africa was very different from that of India, yet the opinion remained that all the Asiatic Elephants constituted but one species, though, as we shall presently show, the examples on which Cuvier established his Elephas africanus, differed specifically inter se. This idea, indeed, had gone so far that no one took the trouble to examine further the Elephants, which were brought alive from time to time from Sumatra to Java, and there kept in a half-domestic state, but people were content to refer them to the so-called Indian or Asiatic ELepnant, to which also, according to Cuvier, the Ceylonese Elephant belongs.
As, however, nothing is proved by a negative, and it is of great importance in a large Museum to obtain illustrations of the Faunas of different countries, I never ceased to urge my predecessor, Heer Temminck, to obtain specimens of the Sumatran Elephant for the Royal Museum. In August, 1845, I was fortunate enough to be gratified in this respect, several examples of Elephants from the district of Palembang in Sumatra, havmg been literally forwarded to the Museum, by his Excellency the Baron J. C. Baud—at that time Governor of the Dutch possessions in India. As I was unpacking them it appeared to me that they differed in several respects from the Elephant of Bengal. I occupied myself, therefore, with drawing up the characters of these two animals, compared with those of the African Elephant, and gave the results to Heer Temminck;
