History of the Rhinoceros 



127 



time as magistrate of the district of P'eng-k'i in the prefecture of T'ung- 

 ch'uan, province of Sze-ch'uan. The chances are that he had never 

 seen the sculptures of ostriches in the mausolea of the T'ang emperors 

 near Li-ts'uan, Shen-si Province; but, be this as it may, his woodcut 

 proves that the T'ang tradition of the representation of the ostrich was 

 wholly unknown to him, and moreover, that he himself had never be- 

 held an ostrich. We have no records to the effect that ostriches were 

 transported to China during the Ming period; and they were then 

 probably known merely by name. Li Shi-chen's 

 production is simply a reconstruction based on 

 the definitions of the texts ("marching with 

 outspread wings, feet of a camel," etc.); the 

 only exact feature is the two toes, which are 

 mentioned also in the older descriptions of the 

 bird; everything else, notably the crane's head, 

 is absurd, and a naturalist of the type of 

 Bretschneider should have noticed this. 



In the great cyclopaedia T'u shu tsi ch'eng, 

 published in 1726, we find a singular illustration 

 of the ostrich, which is reproduced in Fig. 17 as 

 an object-lesson in Chinese psychology. This 

 accomplishment must open every one's eyes: 

 here we plainly see that the illustrator had not 

 the slightest idea of the appearance of an ostrich, 

 but merely endeavored, with appalling result, to 

 outline a sketch of what he imagined the "camel-bird" should 

 look like. He created a combination of a camel and a bird by 

 illustrating the bare words, as they struck his ears, without any 

 recourse to facts and logic; he committed the logical blunder (so 

 common among the Chinese from the days of the Sung period) of 

 confounding a descriptive point of similarity with a feature of reality. 

 All Chinese texts are agreed on the point that the bird is just like a 

 camel, or conveys that impression. This case is most instructive in 

 disclosing the working of the minds of the recent Chinese illustrators, 

 and in exhibiting the value due to their productions. It would not do in 

 the present case to deny that this figure is intended for an ostrich, to 

 define it as a new animal species, a "bird-shaped biped camel " (something 

 like an Avi-camelus bipes), and to conclude that the Chinese term Vo 

 niao does not denote the ostrich. On the contrary, we have to con- 

 clude that illustrations of this character are out and out valueless for 

 our scientific purposes, that definitions of an animal cannot be deduced 

 from them, but that all reasoning on the nature of the respective animal 



Fig. 16. 



Ostrich (from Pin ts'ao 



kang mu). 



