56 Mr. Henry Walker's Lecture:
themselves no inconsiderable item. Sir Antonio may well
assure us that elephant-hunting in Essex is really an
expensive hobby.
And now the grander trophies of elephant-hunting in
Essex are to reward our eyes, the spectacle of the various
skeletons of elephant, rhinoceros, and deer that have thus
been excavated from these fields in the Barking and London-
road. We take train at Ilford for Stratford. We soon
arrive at Sir Antonio Brady's private museum at Stratford-
le-Point, which we are kindly invited to inspect. Here is
a brief account of some of the sights we were privileged to
witness in this wonderful collection of the old-world zoology
of the Thames Valley.
The five bisons' crania which were discovered in the
Uphill pits are lying upon a table, and are still enclosed in
plaster. They have now to be boiled or soaked in a fluid
which shall restore to them the gelatine they have lost
during the millenniums they have been buried in the bosom
of the earth. This is the process which all the bones and
tusks undergo to ensure their permanent hardening.
On the shelves around is a startling display of gigantic
skulls and monstrous bones—bones such as Samson might
have coveted when an ass's jawbone was his only weapon.
Here is a mammoth's tusk ten feet in length. The teeth and
jaws represent elephants of every age and size, from the
sucking calf with his milk molars, to the patriarch of the
herd, whose ultimate molars are so worn down as to be
almost useless for grinding his food. Professor Owen has
seen a mammoth's tooth that measured one foot seven inches
in length, following the curve from end to end on the
convex side !
The characteristic of the Ilford elephants is the number
of the plates in the last molars, which has not been found
to exceed 19 or 20, as against the 24, and sometimes 28,
found in other species. The largest tooth is 10 inches in
length. The spectator cannot fail to be struck with the
long spiral curves of the tusks of the adult mammoths, as
compared with the almost straight tusks of the more familiar
species of modern days. Yet in spite of the enormous size