General Correspondence 131 



a fine pair of horns attached to the head, in the possession of my friend Colonel 

 Pytche (now Chief Commissioner of British Burma), and those upon tlie 

 specimen obtained in Upper Martaban were short and small as in an adolescent 

 animal. On my return to Calcutta I had the specimen in question macerated, 

 and the skin, with the horns upon it, detached from the bone ; and then I was 

 surprised to find that the nasals were completely anchylosed and united, and 

 that the animal accordingly had been a tolerably old one, notwithstanding that 

 its horns were so little developed, and I consequently inferred that the particular 

 individual had probably shed and renewed its horns, however unusual such an 

 occurrence might be. I have now to call attention to the tendency which 

 probably all of the existent species of rhinoceros have to develop a rudimentary 

 or small horn on the forehead. This may now be observed in the instance 

 of the large female of R. indicus, in the Zoological Gardens, Regent's 

 Park, and when I called the attention of Mr A. D. Bartlett (the super- 

 intendent of the establishment) to the circumstance, he surprised me much 

 by telling me that the present appearance is a second one of the kind, the 

 animal having broken off a previous frontal homlet, which he afterwards 

 shewed me. On the occasion of its being violently broken away from the 

 skin, I was informed by him that the animal bled profusely from the place, 

 the blood streaming down its face ; but that the site soon healed over in 

 the usual way, and now a new hornlet has begun to shew. That broken off 

 from the skin is of a subquadrate form, measuring about an inch every way, and 

 the summit of it is ground off by attrition, or it would have been at least half an inch 

 longer. Sir T. Stamford Raffles, in his paper on the Animals of Sumatra (pub- 

 lished in the thirteenth volume of the 'Transactions of the Linnaan Society'), 

 remarks of R. Sumatranus that ' The natives assert that a third horn is some- 

 times met with ; and in one of the young specimens procured, an indication of 

 the kind was observed.' In Mr C. J. Anderson's 'Lake Ngami' the same is 

 remarked of one or more of the ordinarily two-horned rhinoceros of Africa. 

 This traveller writes : — ' I have met persons who told me that they had killed 

 rhinoceroses with three horns ; but in all such cases (and they have been but 

 few) the third or hindmost horn is so small as to be scarcely perceptible'. It 

 is remarkable that Linnceus referred to rhinoceros bearing a third horn. It 

 seems a not unlikely character to have been developed more frequently in 

 some of the extinct species of the genus. As regards the horns of the Asiatic 

 two-horned species (R. Sumatranus), I have seen a pair of them, beautifully 

 carved and polished, and set with the bases upwards, and on a parallel, in a 

 carved black wooden stand, similar to those upon which Chinese metallic mirrors 

 are mounted, and the Chinamen give such extravagant prices for fine specimens 

 that they are exceedingly difficult to be got hold of ; and hence their extreme 

 rarity in mansions. The anterior horn of Colonel Pytche's specimen (before 

 referred to), which is not half the length of that in the British Museum, is worth 

 about 50 rupees, or;i^5, as I was assured by him ; the price increasing, as usual, 

 with the size and length. Both R. Sumatranus and R. Sondaicus, are extensive- 

 ly diffused over the Indo-Chinese countries, and I have been credibly informed 

 by a gentleman, who saw, when in the province, the two horns upon the 

 preserved skin of the head, that an example of the former which had been killed 

 was regarded even in Asia as an exceedingly great rarity. A full-grown female 

 has recently been captured alive near the station of Chittagong, which became 

 moderately tame in the course of a few weeks, and it is probable that we shall 

 see it ere long in the Zoological Gardens. Edward Blyth." 



