A Day's Elephant Hunting in Essex. 37
Happily, he speedily returns with good news. The natives
are not hostile, but amicable. They are inclined to trade
and barter. Better than all, their wares consist of the
very spoils we are in search of. They carry with them,
wrapped in textures of evidently European fabric, some of
the enormous stone-like teeth of fossil elephants, and
various gigantic bones. A brisk exchange is soon set up.
The specie of the Victorian era, strange to say, is current
in the land. One of the best of the purchases is the
complete lower jaw of a young mammoth, with the tooth
in place. (The junior geologists of our party are much
impressed when Sir Antonio pronounces upon it in the
vernacular of science:—"Left lower ramus of calf mam-
moth, with third milk molar in situ." Indeed, some of the
party were seen surreptitiously writing down the mystic
words.) The lucky purchaser of this relic of the juvenile
Ilford elephants will be fortunate if he get his prize safely
home.
Meantime not a few of our party have resumed hunting
for themselves. Some of them have unearthed a few tro-
phies—fragments of tusk (genuine ivory) flaked off a fine
specimen too deeply imbedded for present extraction;
several molar plates of elephants' teeth, horncores of fossil
oxen, and teeth of fossil horse. Soon our palaeontologist
from the British Museum is as busy as our forefather in
Eden giving names to the various animals, as each member,
joint, or limb is brought before him by the delighted dis-
coverers. In short, it is soon felt even by the most sceptical
of the company that Ilford is indeed a great zoological
preserve, and must have a wonderful story.
What this story is, and how it involves the story of
Essex, and of a still wider region in times long since gone
by, we are now to learn.