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. But in no animal is this part
so peculiar as in the elephant, where it attains an extraordinary
and strength. For the elephant uses its nostril as a hand; this
being the instrument with which it conveys food, fluid and solid
alike, to its mouth. With it, too, it tears up trees, coiling it round
their stems. In fact it applies it generally to the purposes of a
hand. For the elephant has the double character of a land animal,
and of one that lives in swamps. Seeing then that it has to get its
food from the water, and yet must necessarily breathe, inasmuch as
it is a land animal and has blood; seeing, also, that its excessive
weight prevents it from passing rapidly from water to land, as some
other sanguineous vivipara that breathe can do, it becomes necessary
that it shall be suited alike for life in the water and for life on
dry land. just then as divers are sometimes provided with
instruments for respiration, through which they can draw air from
above the water, and thus may remain for a long time under the sea, so
also have elephants been furnished by nature with their lengthened
nostril; and, whenever they have to traverse the water, they lift this
up above the surface and breathe through it. For the elephant's
proboscis, as already said, is a nostril. Now it would have been
impossible for this nostril to have the form of a proboscis, had it
been hard and incapable of bending
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