(no subject)
So I was walking out of the library when a book caught my eye. I paged through it, put it back, and then noticed another book, labeled 'BESTIARY.' This also caught my attention, especially when I flipped to a random page and read the caption: "There is an animal called an ELEPHANT, which has no desire to copulate."
I read on:
"...Elephants protect themselves with ivory tusks. No larger animals can be found. The Persians and the Indians, collected into wooden towers on them, sometimes fight each other with javelins as if from a castle. They possess vast intelligence and memory. They march about in herds. And they copulate back-to-back (2).
Elephants remain pregnant for two years, nor do they have babies more than once, nor do they have several at a time, but only one. They live three hundred years. If one of them wants to have a baby, he goes eastward toward Paradise, and there is a tree there called Mandragora, and he goes with his wife. She first takes of the tree and then gives some to her spouse. When they munch it up, it seduces them, and she immediately conceives in her womb. When the proper time for being delivered arrives, she walks out into a lake, and the water comes up to the mother's udders. Meanwhile the father-elephant guards her while she is in labour, because there is a certain dragon which is inimical to elephants..."
Footnote 2:
"The copulation of elephants was a matter for speculation in the dark ages, and still is, as it is rarely witnessed. Solinus quotes Pliny to the effect that their genitals, like those mentioned by Sir Thomas Browne in his note on hares, were put on backward. It was supposed that, being modest, they preferred to look the other way while they were about it. Albertus MAgnus held that they copulated like other quadrupeds, but that, owing to the great weight of the husband, he either had to dig a pit for his wife to stand in or else he had to float himself over her in a lake, where his gravity would naturally be less. In fact, they copulate in the ordinary way and, according to Lieut.-Colonel C. H. Williams, more gracefully than most."
That was more than 50% of the entry for elephants.
Yet another good reason not to be a bio major at WPI.
I read on:
"...Elephants protect themselves with ivory tusks. No larger animals can be found. The Persians and the Indians, collected into wooden towers on them, sometimes fight each other with javelins as if from a castle. They possess vast intelligence and memory. They march about in herds. And they copulate back-to-back (2).
Elephants remain pregnant for two years, nor do they have babies more than once, nor do they have several at a time, but only one. They live three hundred years. If one of them wants to have a baby, he goes eastward toward Paradise, and there is a tree there called Mandragora, and he goes with his wife. She first takes of the tree and then gives some to her spouse. When they munch it up, it seduces them, and she immediately conceives in her womb. When the proper time for being delivered arrives, she walks out into a lake, and the water comes up to the mother's udders. Meanwhile the father-elephant guards her while she is in labour, because there is a certain dragon which is inimical to elephants..."
Footnote 2:
"The copulation of elephants was a matter for speculation in the dark ages, and still is, as it is rarely witnessed. Solinus quotes Pliny to the effect that their genitals, like those mentioned by Sir Thomas Browne in his note on hares, were put on backward. It was supposed that, being modest, they preferred to look the other way while they were about it. Albertus MAgnus held that they copulated like other quadrupeds, but that, owing to the great weight of the husband, he either had to dig a pit for his wife to stand in or else he had to float himself over her in a lake, where his gravity would naturally be less. In fact, they copulate in the ordinary way and, according to Lieut.-Colonel C. H. Williams, more gracefully than most."
That was more than 50% of the entry for elephants.
Yet another good reason not to be a bio major at WPI.