History of the Rhinoceros 113 



which the animal is outlined as a long-tailed antelope with a large 

 single horn curved like that of a gazelle. 1 Pliny, as we saw, credits the 

 monoceros of India with the head of a stag and a single horn on its fore- 

 head (that is, the gazelle-horned Ekagrihga), but does not identify it 

 with the rhinoceros, which was well known to him from the circus. For 

 the first time, as far as the West is concerned, the identification of the 

 single-horned cervine animal with the rhinoceros is made in the Cy- 

 ranides. 2 In the East, the first intimation of it leaks out in our Chinese 

 illustration from Cheng lei pen ts'ao, which depicts the rhinoceros in the 

 form of a deer with one horn on its forehead, and which, without any 

 doubt, is an offshoot of the Indian conception of Ekagrihga. Now, we 

 encounter the curious fact that at a much older date also the Chinese 

 mention a single-horned deer under the name p'ao (No. 9104), described 

 in the Erh ya as an animal "with the tail of an ox and one horn." Pal- 

 ladius 3 straightway translated the word by "rhinoceros," but this 

 venture is not justified by Chinese tradition; the Chinese, in this 

 case, make no reference whatever to the rhinoceros. On the contrary, 

 Kuo P'o, the editor and interpreter of Erh ya, states that the animal 

 p'ao is identical with the deer called chang (No. 407) ; and Yen Shi-ku 

 (579-645), as quoted in K'ang-hi's Dictionary, maintains that it re- 

 sembles in shape the deer chang. The very definition shows that the 

 animal p'ao is a near cousin of the k'i-lin* which has likewise "the tail 



1 Figured by Strzygowski, Der Bilderkreis des griechischen Physiologus, Plate 

 XII (Byzantinische Zeitschrift, Erganzungsheft 1, 1899), and Keller (/. c, p. 419). 

 Regarding the illuminated editions of the Physiologus see also O. M. Dalton, Byzan- 

 tine Art, p. 482 (Oxford, 191 1 ). 



2 Neither Luders nor Muller has consulted these two important passages of 

 Pliny and the Cyranides. 



3 Chinese-Russian Dictionary, Vol. I, p. 58. 



4 At times a temptation was felt to identify the animal lin with the rhinoceros. 

 Shen Kua, the versatile author of the Meng k'i pi fan of the twelfth century, narrates 

 that in the period Chi-ho (1054-56) the country Kiao-chi (Annam) offered a lin like 

 an ox, having the entire body covered with large scales and a single horn on its head. 

 There is no question that this animal was a rhinoceros; this follows also from the 

 further observation of the author that it did not resemble the lin, as described in 

 ancient records, and that there were people designating it as a mountain-rhinoceros 

 (shan si, a variety recognized also by Li Shi-chen). But as Shen Kua could not trace 

 any report in which scales are attributed to the rhinoceros (for explanation see p. 149), 

 he formed the erroneous theory that the animal in question was identical with the 

 T'ien-lu cast in bronze by the Emperor Ling in 186 a.d., a specimen of which he had 

 beheld at Nan-yang in Teng chou in Ho-nan. In a similar manner, Fan Chen of the 

 Sung period, in his work Tung chai ki shi (Ch. i, p. 8; in Shou shan ko ts'ung shu, 

 Vol. 84), tells the story of two K'i-lin sent as tribute from Kiao-chi in the period Kia- 

 yu (1056-63), which he had occasion to see in the imperial palace. He describes them 

 as having the shape of water-buffalo clad with a fleshy armor, and equipped with a 

 single horn on the extremity of the nose; they subsisted on grass, fruit, and melon, 

 and every time before feeding had to be beaten on their horns with a stick. This 

 writer likewise concludes with a discussion, in which serious doubts of the identifica- 

 tion of these animals with the lin are expressed. 



