Elephantish

It is an extinct animal, and on the whole was elephantish, but belonged to the genus Dinotherium, of the group Pachydermata or Proboscidea, to which the mammoth and elephant belong.

They’d watched a herd of cat-sized lizards hunting massive elephantish creatures.

There was a rustle and a bustle and Tiddles reappeared, looking rather sheepish. Can an elephant look sheepish? Can a sheep look elephantish? Do we care? No, we don’t.

People thought it was a sort of shrew, and because it had a long nose they said it looked a bit elephantish. But it's not a shrew and it doesn't really look like an elephant.

The cleverest but one of all the animals in the circus was the elephant, and he hated the circus man too, and hated having to do silly tricks, which weren’t really a bit elephantish, but only stupid.

Thus an elephant remains the same elephant although it changes size (within limits), provided it keeps other elephantish features.

Members of the expedition each encounter a different part of the elephant — a leg, the trunk, an ear — and each, believing that he or she has come upon a tree, a snake, or something else un-elephantish, fails to recognize the elephant.

Since must there not have been some principle of goodness and sagaciousness first, existing in the elephants' perceptions, that the elephant was able to recognize too... some principle of tolerance, or above all pity, for his captor, who could not help himself, and a certain sense of interest in sportive adventure about whatever he was doing that he recognized as amusing and instructive to his elephantish faculties?