424 A NATURALIST ON THE "CHALLENGER 



from mouth to mouth. From this eventually an artist has 

 drawn a picture of the wonderful animal, and this has become 

 the stereotyped representation of the beast, and has been 

 handed down with successive embellishments. 



The story of the Argus no doubt arose from a description of 

 the Argus pheasant or peacock. The Dugong (not the Manattee) 

 was long ago shown bv Sir Emerson Tennant to have given rise 

 to the story of the Mermaid. No doubt the original Mermaid 

 was a black beauty, and only became white-skinned as the 

 story travelled westwards. 



The Unicorn is the Ehinoceros, sketched thus from report ; 

 but the Narwhal's tusk having come to hand as the Unicorn's 

 horn, it was placed on the forehead of the animal, in the draw- 

 ings, and the beast still wears it in our Eoyal Arms* There is 

 the germ of truth in the case of the Narwhal's tusk, that the 

 tusk grows without a fellow on the animal's head ; no doubt it 

 was this fact that led to the blunder. Marco Polo was astonished 

 to find how different the real Unicorn was from the pictures of it 

 he had been accustomed to see. 



The Japanese dealers in carved ivories at Kioto, who speak a 

 few words of English, draw attention to " netskis " cut out of 

 Narwhal ivory, as made from " Unicorn." I suppose this is a 

 survival of an old European term for the tusk, derived from the 

 Portuguese. 



The Dragon, however, seems to have had a different mode of 

 origin, and to have sprung from the finding together in a fossil 

 deposit of the bones of various animals, and the inference, that 

 because they were found together they belonged to one animal. 

 An attempt at reconstruction produced the Dragon, and this 

 accounts for the animal possessing stags' horns and carnivorous 

 teeth, and containing in its structure a little of everything. 



My friend, Mr. C. V. Creagh, of Hong Kong, kindly trans- 



* " The Book of Ser. Marco. Polo," Vol. II, p. 273. Col. H. Yule, 

 C.B. Loudon, Murray, 1875. 



The last attempt to resuscitate the heraldic Unicorn, and prove its 

 actual existence as such, was made in 1852, by Baron J. W. von Miiller, 

 " Das Einhorn vom geschichtlichen und naturwissenschaftlichen Stand- 

 punkte betrachtet." Stuttgart, 1852. 



