History of the Rhinoceros 



169 



The Chou li has a report on the office of the horn-collectors {kio 

 jen) whose task it was to collect teeth, horns, and bones in mountains 

 and marshy places. 1 Cheng K'ang-ch'eng of the second century a.d. 

 comments that the big ones among these objects came from the ele- 

 phant and rhinoceros, those of small dimensions came from Cer- 

 vidae. They did not pick up ox-horns. The word kio ("horn") is 



Fig. 24. 

 Bronze Rhyton attributed to Chou Period (from Kin shi so). 



used also in the sense of a vessel carved from horn; and there are 

 several types of ancient bronze vessels, the names of which are written 

 with characters combined with the classifier kio ("horn"). This 

 would hardly be the case if these various bronze forms did not go 

 back to older vessels carved from horn. He who will study the 

 illustrations of these cups in the Po ku fu hi, or in the T'u shu tsi 

 ch'eng, where they are reproduced after the former work, will be struck 

 by the fact that they do not exhibit the slightest resemblance to ox- 



of nature and has no substitute. A very interesting piece of ancient Japanese pot- 

 tery in the Imperial Museum of Tokyo (figured by N. G. Munro, Prehistoric Japan, 

 p. 483) is made in imitation of an animal's horn, bearing a striking resemblance to 

 a rhinoceros-horn. 



1 Biot, Chou li, Vol. I, p. 378. 

 (Vol. II, p. 586). 



The Chou li describes the rhinoceros-horn as yellow 



