Note 74 — Chapter II · HABITS WHEN WILD.

The term “rogue” is scarcely sufficiently accounted for by supposing it to be the English equivalent for the Singhalese word Hora. In that very curious book, the Life and Adventures of John Christopher Wolf, late principal Secretary at Jaffnapatam in Ceylon, see ante, note, p. 31, the author says, when a male elephant in a quarrel about the females “is beat out of the field and obliged to go without a consort, he becomes furious and mad, killing every living creature, be it man or beast; and in this state is called ronkedor, an object of greater terror to a traveller than a hundred wild ones.” (P. 142.) In another passage, p. 164, he is called runkedor, and I have seen it spelt elsewhere ronquedue. Wolf does not give “ronkedor” as a term peculiar to that section of the island; but both there and elsewhere, it is obsolete at the present day, unless it be open to conjecture that the modern term “rogue” is a modification of ronquedue.