Phil Robinson

“ Henceforth, in far other scenes, other Jung Pershads and other Bijlis, mighty in battle, will win renown, and, winning it, will do for Central Africa what the camel has done for Central Asia, and what ships have done for all the world’s coasts. They will be the pioneers of trade, true missionaries, Asia’s contingent in the little army that has set out to conquer, but without bloodshed, the desperate savagery of the Dark Continent. ”

“ Such splendid docility as this — the docility which in our human veterans we call discipline — is worthy of our recollection when we look at our great captives. But why should we offend against the majesty of the elephant by applauding him for carrying children to and fro unhurt? ”

“ But the world of trade stands in need to-day of the African elephant; and out of his stately solitude, therefore, he must come to carry from the forest to the coast the produce which our markets demand. And for his capture the Arab and Zanzibari can have no more skilful assistants, or it may be teachers, than the veterans of the Indian khedda that have now gone out. Many a wild tusker, no doubt, has Beauty pommelled into servility, and many a one has Budding Lily coaxed by. ”

“ Men ought to have a grudge against this inflated monster, for it is one of the happiest and most useless of living things. Its happiness in a natural state is simply abominable when taken in connection with its worthlessness; and the rhinoceros, next door there, is no better. Providence, to quote the well known judge, has given them health and strength — “instead of which,” they go about munching vegetables and wallowing in warm pools. They do absolutely nothing for their livelihood, except now and then affront the elephant. ”

“ No argument, however ingenious, erudite, or forcible, can knock out of sight such an extremely obvious fact as a giant; and I consider, therefore, that Maclaurin, who attempted to demonstrate, by the destructive method and mathematics, the impossibility of giants, might have saved himself the labor of such profane calculations. ”

“ It has always been the misfortune of huge stature to be taken advantage of, and so many men of strength have been betrayed and brought to grief by Jacks and Aladdins, Omphales and Delilahs, that it has come to be understood that when a man is preternaturally strong he should be also extremely unassuming in demeanor, and liable, therefore, to unprovoked aggression.
It has, I know, been gravely endeavored, by a certain class, to shake the world's belief in the existence of giants, but the attempt has been fortunately unsuccessful. ”

“ It is also curious to notice how the size of Jumbo strikes so many as being somehow very creditable to Behemoth. But praise of such a kind is hardly worth the acceptance of even the hippopotamus. “The wisdom of God,” says Sir Thomas Browne, “receives small honor from those vulgar heads that rudely stare about and, with a gross rusticity, admire His works;” and it is certainly gross rusticity to attribute credit to the elephant for being big. After all, he is not so big as other creatures living, nor as he himself might have been a few centuries ago. ”

“ Wise men have before now told the world that it is well to be drunk once a month, and others that we should not always abstain from that which is hurtful; so the elephant, determining upon a bout of wrong-doing, had some precedent to excuse him. The elephantine proportions of his misdemeanors, however, made his lapse from docility appalling to mere men and women whose individual wicked acts are naturally on so diminutive a scale ”

“ Sometimes, I regret to remember, the giants went about collecting children for pies, and from such as these all right- minded men should withhold their esteem; but for the rest, the ordinary muscular and inoffensive giant, it is impossible to deny a certain liking, nor, when he is provoked to display his strength, a great admiration. ”

“ Sagacity and docility are, no doubt, therefore, virtues which the elephant shares with man, but it is hardly fair to it to illustrate its intelligence by quoting the deplorable incident of the tailor, unless we are also prepared to illustrate the sagacity of men and women by referring to the performances of the Artful Dodger. ”

“ The tendency to mock at a giant becomes, among the lower orders, uncontrollable when Blunderbore is shaky in the lower limbs; and under these circumstances, as it is not legal to make away with giants when used up, he should be either kept in entire obscurity, or only have the uppermost half of him exhibited.
This inclination to make fun of men of exceptionally large stature or extraordinary strength may be due to a half-recognized impression on the mind that such persons are out of our own sphere, superhuman, and preposterous. ”

“ But the skill that comes of practice gave the professional just the one point he needed to beat so splendid an amateur; and he beat him “by sometimes ramming him against a tree, sometimes poking him in the side so as almost to knock him over, sometimes raising his trunk above his head, and bringing it down on the poor tusker’s neck. At last the wild elephant fairly gave up, surrendered, and made no further pretence of either fighting or flying.” ”

“ The destructive argument, however, I confess, has this much in its favor, that it explains why many of the Anakim are weak in the knees, for, inasmuch as the forces tending to destroy cohesion in masses of matter arising from their own gravity only increase in the quadruplicate ratio of their lengths, the opposite forces, tending to preserve that cohesion, increase only in the triplicate ratio. It follows, therefore, that if we only make the giant long enough he must, by mathematics, go at the knee joints. ”

“ The}^ are out of date, too, being, as it were, relics of fables and the representatives of a past world, in which they kept the company of gnomes and dwarfs, ogres, hobgoblins, and other absurd gentry of the kind, living irregular lives, perpetually subject, from their great size, to dangerous accidents, and, as a rule, coming to sudden and ridiculous ends. It was very seldom, indeed, that a giant maintained his dignity to the last, and there hangs, therefore, a vapor of the ludicrous about the memory of the race, so that nowadays men speak of them all as laughable and rather foolish folk. ”

“ That it would have drowned ultimately seemed beyond doubt, but on a sudden the great thing’s intelligence supplemented that of the human beings who were with it, and making up its’ mind that life was worth another effort, and that the ship was unscalable, the elephant began to swim. ”

“ To explain my meaning further I need only refer to the history of that overgrown but otherwise estimable person whose lodgings were burglariously entered by a young person named Jack, who for no apparent reason — such was the laxity of the public morals in those days — climbed up, so we are asked to believe, the stalk of a leguminous vegetable of the bean kind, and, having effected a forcible entry into the giant’s premises, robbed the amiable but stertorous Blunderbore of the most valuable of his effects. ”

“ The tame females, it is well known, seem to take a positive delight in betraying the Samsons of the jungle into slavery; for, after lavishing their caresses upon them till they have tempted them within the fatal circle, they leave them, with a spiteful thump at parting, to the mercy of their captors. ”

“ During the voyage the elephants would persist in standing up all day and night, and the swaying of their huge bodies with the motion of the ship nearly dislocated even their columnar legs, — nearly fractured also the timbers of the deck. ”

“ In the stories which are so precious to childhood, giants, when they have not got ogresses as wives, are never objects of complete aversion. On the contrary, the young reader rejoices over the downfall of the bulky one, not on the score of his vices, or because he deserves his fate, but because the child’s sympathies naturally incline towards the undersized personages of the story ”

“ Their bulk, therefore, is either abused by them or wasted, so that their monstrous size and strength really become a reproach.
With the elephant it is very different. Every ounce of his weight goes to the help of man, and every inch of his stature to his service.
I have said above that giants are always popular, and as perhaps the observation may be contested in the nursery, I would here, in the chapter on gigantic animals, interpolate my defence. ”

“ Indeed, in our own modern literature will be found much excellent matter with regard to weak-kneed giants from which it appears that the show-frequenting public take no delight whatever in infirm Goliaths; and those who may have any to exhibit will do better to put the feeble-legged Gogs and Magogs to useful tasks about the house or back-garden than display them in public for gain. In one of these stories the giants, when they became decrepid, waited upon the dwarfs attached to the show. ”

“ The weight of an elephant, however, was an unknown quantity, but a general average of twenty tons being mooted was accepted by the company as a safe estimate — an elephant as a rule being something less than three tons. ”

“ Owls never go mad. They may go silly, or they may be born idiots; but, as Oliver Wendell Holmes says, a weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself Stupidity often saves a man from insanity. ”

“ Nor, when we speak loftily of the elephant’s docility, should we forget that the measure of this virtue may be gauged by the individual’s capacities for the reverse. A white mouse is one of the most docile of animals, but w^hat would it matter if it were not? ”