History of the Rhinoceros 139 



poison l threatens, a man takes his meals in other people's houses, he 

 first ought to stir his food with a rhinoceros-horn. When a man hit by 

 a poisonous arrow is on the verge of dying, and his wound is slightly 

 touched with a rhinoceros-horn, foam will come forth from his wound, 

 and he will feel relief. 2 This property of the horn 'communicating 

 with the sky' of neutralizing poison is accounted for by the fact that 

 the animal, while alive, particularly feeds on poisonous plants and 

 trees provided with thorns and brambles, 3 while it shuns all soft and 

 smooth vegetal matter. Annually one shedding of its horn takes place 

 in the mountains, and people find horns scattered about among the 

 rocks; 4 in this case, however, they must deposit there, in the place of the 

 real one, another horn carved from wood, identical with that one in color, 

 veins, and shape. Then the rhinoceros remains unaware of the theft. 

 In the following year it moves to another place to shed its horn. 5 Other 

 kinds of rhinoceros-horn also are capable of neutralizing poison, without 

 having, however, the wonderful power of the t'ung-t'ien variety." 



Su Kung, the editor of the T'ang sin pen ts'ao (the revised edition 

 of the materia medica of the T'ang dynasty) states as follows: "The 

 tse (No. 12,325) is the female rhinoceros. The patterns on its horn are 

 smooth, spotted, white, and clearly differentiated. It is ordinarily 

 called the 'spotted rhinoceros' (pan si). It is highly esteemed in pre- 



1 See T'oung Pao, 1913, p. 322. 



2 The belief that the horn will check the effects of poisoned arrows is repeated in 

 the Pel hu lu, written by Tuan Kung-lu around 875 in the T'ang period (Pelliot, Bul- 

 letin de VEcolefrancaise, Vol. IX, 1909, p. 223). The notes of this book regarding the 

 horn are all based on the text of Ko Hung; instead of t'ung t'ien si, the term t'ung si 

 is employed. 



3 The animal feeds, indeed, on herbage, shrubs, and leaves of trees. 



4 The supposition of the rhinoceros shedding its horn regularly has not been ascer- 

 tained by our zoologists; but it is not very probable that it does so, nor have the Chi- 

 nese made the actual observation. It is clear that their conclusion is merely based 

 on the circumstantial evidence of detached horns occasionally found and picked up 

 in the wilderness, which suggested to them the notion of a natural process similar 

 to the shedding of cervine antlers. 



6 A similar story is told in regard to the elephant by Chen Kuan, who wrote two 

 treatises on the medical virtues of drugs, and who died in the first part of the seventh 

 century (Bretschneider, Bot. Sin., pt. 1, p. 44): "The elephant, whenever it sheds 

 its tusks, itself buries them. The people of K'un-lun make wooden tusks, stealthily 

 exchange them, and take the real ones away." K'un-lun is the Chinese designation 

 for the Malayan tribes of Malacca, and was extended to Negrito, Papua, and the 

 negroes of Africa (see Hirth and Rockhill, Chau Ju-kua, p. 32). In this connec- 

 tion we should remember also the words of Pliny (Nat. hist., vni, 3, §7), that the 

 elephants, when their tusks have fallen out either accidentally or from old age, bury 

 them in the ground (quam ob rem deciduos casu aliquo vel senecta defodiunt). It 

 is not impossible that the great quantity of fossil ivory mentioned as early as by 

 Theophrast (De lapidibus 37, Opera ed. F. Wimmer, p. 345; compare the interesting 

 notes of L. de Launay, Mineralogie des anciens, Vol. I, pp. 387-390, Bruxelles, 1803) 

 may have given rise to this notion. 



