THE WHITE RHINOCEROS 185 



of this region have betaken themselves. It is to 

 be feared they cannot long survive, even in that 

 unhealthy, fever-stricken bit of country, dangerous 

 though it is to the white hunter. From a letter to 

 the Field in November 1894, written by Mr. C. L. 

 Leatham of Zululand, it seems that during that year 

 more than six specimens of Rhinoceros simus were 

 shot between these rivers, two of them falling to the 

 rifles of a well-known hunter, Mr. C. E.. Yarndell. 

 Of these two, one, an excellent specimen, carrying 

 a three-foot fore-horn, has been preserved. South 

 Africa has been so ransacked by big game hunters, 

 that it is now hardly likely that any fresh discoveries 

 of these gigantic mammals will again be made. Nor 

 is it probable that the few specimens (if any) still 

 remaining in life will enjoy any prolonged immunity. 

 The white rhinoceros differed mainly from its 

 black cousin (Ehinoceros hicornis), the common African 

 rhinoceros, in its much greater size and bulk, its 

 enormously long fore-horn, immense and dispro- 

 portionate head^ and square blunt upper-lip. The 

 black rhinoceros, which feeds upon bushes and 

 shrubs, has a pendent or prehensile upper-lip. The 

 white rhinoceros, which fed always upon grasses, 

 and therefore needed no prehensile lip, can be at 

 once and easily distinguished by this striking differ- 

 ence in the upper-lip. The length of the fore-horn, 

 in the case of the white rhinoceros, was sometimes 



