The Wonders of the Jungle, Book Two

Sarath Ghosh wrote this second Heath reader in 1918, opening with a promise he had made in Book One: to explain the laws of the elephant herd. He presents that herd as a republic, with a president responsible for daily food and water and for order, and with policemen elephants that arrest a wrongdoer and put him through something close to a trial. The rest of the book belongs to the flesh-eaters. Ghosh follows the tiger and the lessons a tigress gives her cubs, then ranges well past India to the African lion, the leopard, the jaguar of the Amazon, and the American gray wolf. He addresses his readers as “my dear” and keeps asking them to think rather than memorize, so the zoology arrives inside stories, Androcles and the lion among them.