Chapter XXXIII.

Of all wild animals the elephant is the most tame and gentle; for many of them are capable of instruction and intelligence, and they have been taught to worship the king. It is a very sensitive creature, and abounding in intellect. The male never again touches a female that he has once impregnated. Some persons say that the elephant will live for two hundred years, others an hundred and twenty, and the female lives nearly as long as the male. They arrive at perfection when sixty years old. They bear winter and cold weather very badly. It is an animal that lives in the neighbourhood of rivers, though not in them. It can also walk through rivers, and will advance as long as it can keep its proboscis above the surface; for it blows and breathes through this organ, but it cannot swim on account of the weight of its body.