The more time went on, the wilder the stories about their appearance and habits became. HOW THE ELEPHANT GOT ITS TRUNK Jean Richards, Author, Norman Gorbaty, Illustrator, illus. Since the days of Henry III’s pachyderm, attitudes towards the classics had begun to change. Pentru comenzi, va invit sa vizitati pagina mea: https://www.facebook.com/RamonaPetrescuUsborne/Elephants didn't always have long trunks - … These explanations had the same problem. According to a study published in 2015, the length of the elephant’s trunk is proportional to the amount of food it can cram in its mouth, and most likely evolved in response to the declining nutritional content of the leaves on which it feeds. A version of this idea is found in Kipling’s story. What is the WPS button on a wireless router? “How the Elephant Got Its Trunk” is my new play. Later on, the monkeys were furious that the elephant didn't give them the banana's so they pulled and pulled on the elephant's nose, making it very long. “No!” Yelled the greedy elephant and he pounced on the snake. Having had its nose stretched by the crocodile, the theory went, the young elephant should be able to pass its super-sized schnozz on to its own children. Set on he banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River in Africa. Later on, they sat down and began to discuss their experiences. Held high above the surface of the water, the trunk is used like a snorkel so the elephant can breathe even when its entire body is submerged. Utterly different to any other animal, in both size and shape, elephants captivated the classical and post-classical imagination. At first, contact was probably made through trade. Price New from Used from Library Binding "Please retry" $17.59 — $17.59: Paperback "Please retry" Directed by Steve Bendelack. Over time, this process of ‘natural selection’ would favour the evolution of particular traits. Later, war played a greater role. Is Betty White close to her stepchildren? This suggested that its true function was something else. They had lumpy black noses instead. elephant to come closer. Watching the video … When crocodile snapped his nose and the other animals pulled elephant by the This book is a very child friendly book with easy to understand language and beautiful, colourful pictures to compliment the story and its … In the natural sciences, progress was less marked, however. Bede repeated the story of the elephant’s rivalry with dragons, while a 13th-century English bestiary argued that elephants breed only in the Garden of Eden. Praising it as the ‘most admirable’ instrument Nature had ever granted an animal, Buffon argued that its length and ability to perform several functions at once (smell, touch, respiration, etc.) His fame was sealed when he reached Castel Sant’Angelo, where the pope was waiting. That, Kipling smiled, was how the elephant got its trunk. See all formats and editions Hide other formats and editions. When a curious child elephant wonder what a crocodile ate fir In the High and Far-Off Times the Elephant, O Best Beloved, had no trunk. According to Oppian, for example, elephants were ‘infinite in size’; Pliny the Elder claimed they were prone to ‘flatulence’; Cassidorus was convinced they worshipped God, yet also insisted that they had no knees; and Isidore of Seville suggested they gave birth in water or on an island so as to prevent dragons from killing their offspring. With Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton, Reece Shearsmith, Isabelle Estelle Corbusier. How long will the footprints on the moon last? Aristotle’s teleological approach was revived; but, though emphasis was placed on observation, it was used to complement – rather than challenge – earlier explanations for the length of the elephant’s trunk. The elephant cried out in pain and tried to pull his trunk out but the crocodile held on to it. Observing that the population of a species would grow exponentially unless restrained by predation, Buffon postulated that Nature gave each animal precisely those characteristics needed for it to survive the ongoing struggle for existence. Conrad Gessner, for example, accepted that form was determined by function and differed from classical auctores only in his willingness to believe that several functions might have been at play. The flaws were obvious to see. He wanted to know what the crocodile had for dinner. Therefore, it makes use of its trunk both to gather its food and to pour copious draughts of water down its throat.’ On the rare occasions when elephants did make an appearance, it was generally in the guise of an exotic gift given by one potentate to another: such as that sent to Charlemagne by Haroun al-Rashid in 801, or to Henry III of England by Louis IX of France in 1255. And that is how the elephant got its trunk. If your impeached can you run for president again? ‘[S]ince it is taller than every other animal’, he explained in the Hexameron, ‘it cannot bend down to feed. became longer and longer. Just like Aristotle’s argument, however, it raised more questions than answers. The Battle of Zama, 202 BC, in which the Roman general Scipio Africanus defeated Hannibal’s Carthaginian army. ... particularly when it is a moral issue. It’s a silly story, of course; but like all good tales, it contains a kernel of truth – or rather, the husk of a puzzle. The one who touched the foot said the elephant was like a tree trunk. What is the moral of How the Elephant Got its Trunk. Though native to Africa and parts of southern Asia, elephants had been known in Europe from an early date. In De partibus animalium, Aristotle argued that ‘animals have the parts they have in order to be able to perform the functions for which [those parts] are designed’. How the elephant got its trunk is adapted from a story by British Nobel laureate Rudyard Kipling. But if it was just an olfactory organ, there would be no need for it to be any bigger than ours. Albertus Magnus was typical. How the elephant solves this challenge could provide inspiration for future robotics. Since no one would tell him, he went down to the banks of the Limpopo to find out for himself. In Philosophie zoologique (1809) he argued that animals could acquire characteristics through use and then pass them on to their descendants. The one, who touched its ears, said the elephant was like a gigantic fan. A wild African elephant eats rapidly, consuming 190 grams of food a minute, to provide adequate fuel for its … The elephant got its trunk, the story goes, because one small elephant child was so curious as to what a hungry crocodile ate for dinner that he got too close to it. There was another possibility. In the elephants’ case, trunks were hence best understood as a response to specific environmental factors. crocodile snapped at the child's nose. These stories were written when Kipling lived in Vermont, USA. Rudyard Kipling’s illustration of the elephant’s child for his Just So Stories, 1902 © British Library Board/Bridgeman Images. Despite this absence, pictorial representations of elephants became more common, especially from the mid-13th century onwards. Though trunks still looked quite a lot like flared vacuum hoses, they were drawn with more care than whimsy. An elephant looks very clumsy and heavy and yet it can move very quickly. dinner. Reversing the logic, this meant that, if you could find out what function the elephant’s trunk served, you should be able to guess why it had to be so big. The elephant is a very intelligent animal. He had only a blackish, bulgy nose, as big as a boot, that he could wriggle about from side to side; but he couldn’t pick up things with it. most likely evolved in response to the declining nutritional content of the leaves on which it feeds. FREE Shipping. In the belief that elephants only ate food found deep underwater and were too heavy to surface very often, he suggested that they needed long trunks to breathe. In the centuries that followed, as polities fragmented and the Mediterranean was rent by religious divides, things only went downhill. Both the elephant and the zebra had each end of the snake in their mouths. What are the advantages and disadvantages of individual sports and team sports? https://blog.rhinoafrica.com › 2017 › 08 › 31 › just-stories-how-elephant-trunk Aristotle thought that it was a kind of snorkel. It took millennia to find out. The obvious answer was that it was used for smelling. © Copyright 2021 History Today Ltd. Company no. Suddenly, the crocodile noticed the elephant. What is the moral of How the Elephant Got its Trunk? In contrast to Lamarck, Darwin argued that, in any given population, a certain amount of variation would occur naturally and that those individuals with characteristics best suited to their circumstances would be most likely to survive and reproduce. Opinion was divided. ‘In the High and Far off Times, the Elephant … had no trunk,’ wrote Rudyard Kipling. This only muddied waters further. "How dare you drink from my river when you were told not to?" In one manuscript, showing Henry III’s elephant, the trunk has even been drawn twice. In the visual arts, classicising tendencies were tempered by a desire to imitate nature. That, Kipling smiled, was how the elephant got its trunk. For St Ambrose, by contrast, it compensated for the elephant’s enormous size and supposed lack of knees. Let's Go for a Drive! Only with the appearance of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) was a more compelling explanation offered. From this point of view, elephants’ trunks were long because they were a cog in the mechanism laid down by the ‘watchmaker’ in the sky. How the Elephant Got Its Trunk Adapted by Susan LaBella From a Story by Rudyar Kipling NARRATOR 1: Long, l-o-o-o-ng ago, elephants did not have trunks. With only rare exceptions, such as Matthew Paris, most authors tended simply to reheat classical chestnuts, seasoned with a little make-believe of their own. 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