Nature: 'Jumbomania" is the essential word enriching Eric Scigliano's elephantine vocabulary - elephantine in the best possible sense.
He is an elephantologist, a connoisseur of elephantiana, whose dedication to his subject verges on obsession. With the disciplined zeal of a historian, a zoologist and an ecological evangelist, he has written the elephiliacs' Song of Songs.
He first fell in love with elephants as a child in Vietnam between French and American wars, and still remains "helplessly fascinated". Now living in Seattle, he is an expert on the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus), the African elephant (Loxodonta Africana) and their proboscidean ancestors, the mammoths and mastodons, which, for more than 20 million years, "ruled the world, as much as any organisms larger than bacteria could be said to".
"These proto-elephants and quasi-elephants were, with the giant ground slots, the biggest creatures to walk the earth after the dinosaurs departed, and probably the brainiest until the hominids arrived. They spread across every terrain, from tundra, desert and mountains to tropical swamps and scattered islands . . . "
It seems human hunters reduced the elephants' natural habitats to Asia and Africa, where they survive today in shrinking numbers. Western zoos and circuses preserve only a few specimens.
Scigliano marvels at the physique and character of what John Van Couvering of the American Museum of Natural History has called "the ultimate in giant mammal design". About 60 times human weight, the world's largest land mammal, after 22 months' gestation, normally lives as long as people. Its brain is twice the size of a human's, though much smaller, of course, in relation to its overall bulk. Though capable of prodigiously loud bellowing, the elephant can communicate in close proximity and over long distances by infrasound inaudible to human ears.
The elephant's most wonderful feature is its trunk, motivated by 60,000 muscles, so strong that it can lift a huge log, and so sensitive that it can pick up a single grain of rice. Scigliano describes the trunk as "the original multipurpose tool: a crane, forceps, whip, vise, noose, snorkel, shower, vacuum, jet blower, trumpet, bludgeon and probe - a supple, writhing tentacle . . ."
Elephants are esteemed for their wisdom, affection and gentleness, except when a bull elephant riots in a testosterone-fuelled rampage or an elephant of either gender violently expresses a grievance that may have been harboured for years. Scigliano quotes Dorothy Parker's comment on elephants' most famous attribute: "Women and elephants never forget".
He traces the elephant's long, paradoxical history, as a battle-tank from Hannibal, Alexander the Great and the Romans (Julius Caesar minted a coin depicting an elephant of his stamping on an enemy snake); as the 16th-century Emperor Akbar's executioner, goring and crushing condemned prisoners; as a religious icon, venerated by Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims; as a herculean worker, hauling teak logs from Burmese jungles; as the victim of ivory holocausts in the 19th and 20th centuries; as an entertainer, in parades and circuses, and, in zoos, giving rides to children.
In the 1880s, the worst time of the first holocaust, about 100,000 elephants were slaughtered annually to provide ivory for various works of art and commerce, including piano keys and billiard balls. Pianists still "tickle the ivories", even now that the keys are usually made of plastic.
Genesh, the Hindus' popular elephant-god, known as the "Remover of Obstacles", patronises writers and merchants. Scigliano presents elephants as symbols of culture, as in Orwell's anti-colonial essay "Shooting an Elephant"; Disney's fantastic flying elephant, rudely named Dumbo; Balanchine's and Stravinsky's ponderous elephant ballet; Jean de Brunhoff's beloved, anthropomorphic Barbar; the pink elephants said to be seen on some tremulous mornings after; white elephants that one dictionary defines as "useless or unwanted possessions"; and the US Republican Party's mascot, which is suitable, in the opinion of Adlai Stevenson, because it "has a thick skin, a head full of ivory, and, as everyone who has seen a circus parade knows, proceeds best by grasping the tail of its predecessor".
By the end of this well written, well illustrated survey, one may see pachydermal intimations everywhere, and good reasons for conserving elephants, nowhere suggested better than in the author's quotation from John Donne, which goes, in part:
Natures great master-peece, an Elephant
The onely harmlesse great thing . . .
• Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic