556 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol XVI. 



Though in exceptional cases an individual may be of a vicious 

 temperament and inclined to be troublesome without provocation, or 

 to charge when suddenly disturbed, as when lying down (as many 

 kinds of animals may do), my small experience tends to make me 

 believe that a rhinoceros is as anxious to preserve a whole hide as 

 most other beasts. I have more than once in dense cover been closer 

 than I really liked without being able to obtain a reasonable shot, the 

 animal knowing he was being hunted. So far I have not had one 

 turn on me, for which I am not sorry, not having the smallest desire 

 that one should do so as I have learned that however ungainly and 

 awkward their appearance may be it is a pure fallacy to consider them 

 wanting in agility. On the contrary they are astonishingly agile. 

 When wounded, if the assailant be in view and the animal not too sick 

 he may charge, and he is, as I have remarked, an active and dangerous 

 beast and what is worse requires some stopping. I have only heard 

 of a couple of instances in which unwounded animals have given 

 trouble. On one occasion two rhino held up a party of survey coolies 

 in the course of their work, and on the other a rhino chased a gun 

 bearer or hunter who managed to climb a tree, but had not got far 

 enough up before the rhino overtook him and w r as able to give him 

 a bite as well as afford him a hoist up. The Burmans state that in 

 attacking, these brutes use their incisors freely, also the horn, and finish 

 up by trampling on their adversary. 



Mason in his work on Burma, Volume 1, page 451, writes thus : — 

 " The common single horned rhinoceros is very abundant. Though 

 often seen on the uninhabited banks of large rivers as the Tenasserim 

 they are fond of ranging the mountains, and I have frequently met 

 with their wallowing places on the banks of mountain streams two or 

 three thousand feet above the plains." 



During the past twenty years at least, and in spite of most guns 

 having been withdrawn, I do not think anyone in the province would 

 consider either species abundant or common, or even moderately so 

 anywhere. If they are still so it must be in tracts most inaccessible 

 and little visited by Europeans. It is probable that, confining them- 

 selves as they often do to localized areas, four to six animals or even 

 a couple wandering over such, by crossing and recrossing, would make 

 numerous tracks in many directions and this, taken in conjunction with 

 the fact that in such areas pools and wallows would be met with which 



