But just when this peep into the rare show of Nature is lifting my soul into sublimity, I am brought down to the base earth again by an exception. This is the plague of all high science. You design a stately theory, collect from many quarters a wealth of facts to establish it with, and have arranged them with cumulative and irresistible force, when some disgusting, uninvited case thrusts itself in on your notice and refuses to fit into your argument at all. In this instance it is "my lord the elephant." That he has no need to concern himself about any bloodthirsty beast that may be lurking in the jungle is not more obvious than that his ears are the biggest in the world. Now there are two ways of getting rid of an obstruction of this kind. One is to betake yourself to your thinking chair and pipe and to rake up the possibilities of the Pleiocene and Meiocene ages, and prove that when the immense ear of the elephant was evolved there must have been some carnivorous monster, some sabre-toothed tiger or cave bear, which preyed on elephants.
The other way is to get acquainted with the elephant, cultivate an intimacy with him, and find out what his ears are to him. I prefer the second way. I would patiently watch him as he stands drowsily under an umbrageous banian tree on a sultry day before the monsoon has burst and refreshed earth and air. So might I note that his ears are incessantly moving, but not turning this way and that to catch sounds--just flapping, flapping, as if to cool his great temples. So have I seen the gigantic fruit bats, called flying foxes in India, hanging in hundreds in the upper branches of a tall peepul tree at noon, feeling too hot to sleep, and all fanning themselves in unison with one wing--a comic spectacle. And at each flap of the elephant's ears I would observe that a cloud of flies (for the elephant is not too great to be pestered by the despicable hordes of beggars for blood) were dislodged from their feeding grounds about his head and neck, and, trying to settle about his rear parts, were driven back again by the swinging of his tail. Then I should say that ear is just a fan. How significant it is that among the emblems of royalty in the East the three chiefest are an umbrella-bearer, two men who stand behind and swing great punkahs modelled on the elephant's ear, and two others carrying yak's tails wherewith to scare the flies from the royal person! The elephant is a rajah!