History of the Rhinoceros 161 



juxtaposition of rhinoceros and tiger is noteworthy, for it turns up 

 again in Chuang-tse: "To travel by water and not avoid sea-serpents 

 and dragons, — this is the courage of a fisherman. To travel by land 

 and not avoid the rhinoceros and the tiger, — this is the courage of 

 hunters." l And in Lao-tse's Tao te king (Ch. 50) : " He who knows how 

 to take care of his life, when travelling by road, never meets rhinoceros 

 or tiger; when entering the army, he does not require defensive or 

 offensive armor. The rhinoceros, therefore, finds no place where to 

 insert its horn, the tiger where to lay its claws, the soldier where to 

 pierce him with his sword." 2 Finally in the passage of Lun yil 3 already 

 referred to. 



The extermination of wild animals made rapid progress; the grad- 

 ually advancing Chinese agriculturist cleared the hills and deforested 

 the plains in order to till the ground and to yield the means of subsist- 

 ence for the steadily increasing populace. The famous passage in 

 Meng-tse* is of primary importance: Chou-kung, the organizer of the 

 government of the Chou dynasty, broke the rebellions and established 

 peace throughout the empire; "he drove far away also the tigers, leop- 

 ards, rhinoceroses, and elephants, — and all the people was greatly 

 delighted." Toward the end of the Chou period (middle of the third 

 century B.C.) the one-horned rhinoceros was, in all likelihood, extinct 

 in northern China ; and the two-horned species had gradually withdrawn, 

 and taken refuge in the high mountain-fastnesses of the south-west. 

 The strong desire prevailing in the epoch of the Chou for the horn of the 

 animal, which was carved into ornamental cups, and for its valuable 

 skin, which was worked up into armor, had no doubt contributed to its 

 final destruction in the north. So there is no reason to wonder that 

 to the later authors the extinct animal se was a blank, and offered a 

 convenient field for fanciful speculations. 5 



1 Giles, Chuang Tzu, p. 214. 



2 Compare S. Julien, Le livre de la voie et de la vertu, p. 183. It is noticeable 

 that the word kia, which in Lao-tse's time designated a cuirass of rhinoceros-hide, 

 appears here in close connection with the rhinoceros. 



3 Legge, Chinese Classics, Vol. I, p. 307. 



4 Legge, The Chinese Classics, Vol. II, p. 281. 



6 It is a well-known phenomenon in all languages that newly-discovered animals 

 are named for those already known, for example, that sea-mammals are named for 

 land-mammals to which they bear some outward resemblance, or insects for larger 

 animals. Thus we know a rhinoceros-beetle (Oryctes rhinoceros) with horns or pro- 

 cesses on its head (see Science, 1913, p. 883), and a rhinoceros-bird or hornbill (Buceros 

 rhinoceros) noted for the extraordinary horny protuberance on the crest of its bill. 

 These examples certainly do not mean that our word "rhinoceros" originally referred to 

 an insect or a bird ; but in our effort to coin a name for this beetle and bird, we happened 

 to hit upon the rhinoceros, because certain characteristics of it were, by way of 

 comparison, seen in the former. It is exactly the same when the Chinese, in literary 



