Quarto. viii, 135pp, [1]. With a woodcut frontispiece, a further 52 plates, and nine illustrations in the text. Original publisher's navy cloth-backed drab paper boards. Extremities rubbed. Occasional pencilled annotations.

The first edition of Australian-British anatomist and anthropologist Grafton Elliot Smith's (1871-1937) study of the depiction of elephants in early human culture. A leading proponent of the hyperdiffusionist view of prehistory (the pseudoarchaeological hypothesis that historical technologies or ideas originated with a single people or civilization before their adoption by other cultures), Smith argues that Indian depictions of Elephantidae influenced the art of the Mayans in Central America.