RHINOCEROS. 17.') 



wliicli is always tVozon, iim.st have pivst'ived it. Tlio ground is iu-vt_'r tliawid to any <>Teat deptli 

 near the river. In tlu' valleys, where the soil is half sand and halt' clay, it is still frozen at the close 

 of summer two feet below the surface. Had it not been for these eireiimstanees, the skin and other 

 soft parts could not have been so long preserved." It would be unfair to quote his further 

 speculations as to this animal having been necessarily transjiorted from the torrid zone to the 

 frozen regions at the time of the Deluge. They correspond to the ideas of his time, and, where 

 erroneous, his age is more in fault than he. His description is what we have really to do with. 



From Brandt's examination,* it appears that the dried skin is of a dirty yellowish colour. 

 He gives a fiic-similc coloured figure of it with his paper, which is extremely interesting. Tlie 

 flesh of the muscles is reddish. The ev'es are lost (dried out) ; the lids beset with short stifl" 

 bristles ; the ear-muscles are eutirelv' gone ; and the whole of the anterior part of the snout is 

 unfortunately so much injured, that the form of the nostrils and of the anterior margins of the lips 

 cannot be ascertained, so that wo cannot tell whether it had a prehensile snout or not, one fitted for 

 browsing or grazing. The skin does not form callous folds on the head. The mouth is much 

 smaller than in the living species. The skin is of considerable thickness, about half-an-iuch deep 

 at the throat ; its surface smooth, granulated at the lips ; densely covered all over with reticulated 

 or roundish pores, arranged quincunxially. Tlie head and feet are clothed with hair. The hairs 

 stand closely together in tufts in these pores ; some are long, stifi" bristles ; others are softer and 

 , shorter ; without any peculiar microscojjic structure. The single horns which have been found in 

 Siberia have the structure of the horns of the living species. Their leug-th does not appear to 

 exceed three feet. The auditory passage is clad with short fine hairs. The muscles found on the 

 head show neither in their arrangement nor in their intimate structure any deviation from those of 

 the li\-ing species, nor has any peculiarity worthy of notice been observed in the vessels or nerves. 

 The food appears to have consisted principally of the leaves and j'oung shoots of pine-trees. Brandt 

 extracted from the pits of the molar teeth of Pallas' frozen specimen part of the albuminous seed of a 

 poh'gonous plant, portions of pine-leaves, and minute fragments of coniferous wood, characterized 

 by the distinctive porous cells. f 



This Rhinoceros Hved during the post-glacial epoch in the middle and North of Europe and Nortli 

 Asia. It was, with the Mammoth, one of the commonest pachyderms of our part of the world. 

 Its bones, teeth, and even entire skeletons, have been found in Siberia, also in Russia, in Europe, 

 in Poland, Germany, England, and France. In the bone-layers of Seveckeuberges, near Quedlinburg, 

 alone, the remains of upwards of a hundred iudividuals have been collected. It does not 

 follow, however, from the extensive district over which the bones of this animal are found tliat 

 it lived over the whole of it at the same time. I imagine it to have been a boreal animal, always 

 hanging upon the outskirts of the Arctic regions as the Reindeer and Elk do now, and that its 

 remains left in countries whose climate is now mild are only proofs that at the time the animal 

 died, the glacial cold had not retreated farther north than that latitude. 



Rii. i.Ei'TOKiiixus, C((r., is another extinct sjjecics, whose remains occur all over Europe — 

 in the more recent terliaries of the South of France, Italy, England — more particularly at Montpelier, 

 I'isa, the Issoire, &c. 



Another .species, Rh. megariiixis of Dc Chfi>itol (ai.e.ed to Rn. leptorhi.nus), has been found 



* BR.VXDT, m "Mem. Acad. St. Putcrsb." Gtli scr. torn. vii. 1849. 



t Leo.vuaui) and Broxn's " Jahibuch," 1840, \i. 378 ; and Bronx's "Lethxa Geoguo.-,tica," III., p. 855, 1851. 



