particularly impressed by their skill in opening chain shackles,
and unfastening the catches and locks of doors and gates. And
really, Kartoum's ingenuity in finding out how to open latches and
bolts is almost inexhaustible, as well as marvelous.

Keeper Richards declares that our late African pygmy elephant,
Congo, was the wisest animal he ever has known. I have elsewhere
referred to his ability in shutting his outside door. Richards
taught him to accept coins from visitors, deposit them in a box,
then pull a cord to ring a bell, one pull for each coin
represented. The keeper devised four different systems of intimate
signals by which he could tell Congo to stop at the right point,
and all these were so slight that no one ever detected them. One
was by a voice-given cue, another by a hand motion, and a third
was by an inclination of the body.

Keeper Richards relates that Congo would go out in his yard,
collect a trunkful of peanuts from visitors, bring them inside and
secretly cache them in a corner behind his feed box. Then he would
go out for more graft peanuts, bring them in, hide them and
proceed to eat the first lot. There are millions of men who do not
know what it is to conserve something that can be eaten.

In this discussion of the intellectual powers and moral qualities
of the elephant I will confine myself to my own observations on
_Elephas indicus_, except where otherwise stated. A point to
which we ask special attention is that in endeavoring to estimate
the mental capacity of the elephant, we will base no general
conclusions upon _any particularly intelligent individual_,
as all mankind is tempted to do in discussions of the intelligence