RHINE 



4994 



RHINOCEROS 



Louis XTV made gains, and Napoleon restored 

 the old Roman boundaries of France. Even 

 after Napoleon's fall, Alsace, which borders the 

 Rhine from Switzerland to beyond Strassburg, 

 was left in French hands, but it was wrested 

 from their grasp in 1870, only to be once more 

 battled over in the War of the Nations. For 

 the fate of the Rhine country in 1919, see VER- 

 SAILLES, TREATY OF. 



The Course of the River. In the eastern end 

 of Switzerland, close to the Italian border, two 

 glacier-fed mountain torrents start northward. 

 One is the Vordcrrhcin, or Hither-Rhine, the 

 other the Hintcrrhcin or Farther-Rhine. From 

 their union the Rhine hurries along the edge of 

 Austria and the miniature state of Liechten- 

 stein to Lake Constance, which frees it of its 

 mountain mud and sends it westward, tumbling 

 over a fall of seventy feet at Schaffhausen, 

 thence to wind between Baden and Switzerland 

 to Basel, where it turns sharply to the north. 

 It receives tributaries from every Swiss canton 

 except Geneva. 



When it turns towards the North Sea the 

 Rhine flows between the Black Forest on the 

 right and the Vosges Mountains on the left. 

 Though it can be navigated at this point its 

 current is so swift that boats use the Rhone- 

 Rhine Canal as far as Strassburg. From Basel 

 the river gradually opens until it is about a 

 half-mile wide, but suddenly plunges into a 

 narrow gorge at the town made famous by Mrs. 

 Norton's poem of the "soldier of the Legion" 

 who was "born at Bingen, fair Bingen on the 

 Rhine." From here to the Dragon's Rock, as in 

 the famous description from Childe Harold, 



The river nobly foams and flows, 



The charm of this enchanted ground, 



And all its thousand turns disclose 

 Some fresher beauty varying round. 



There are peaks crowned with ruined castles, 

 once the strongholds of robber barons who 

 forced their toll from every boat that passed; 

 there is the rock where sat the Lorelei immor- 

 talized by Heine, the maiden "of wondrous 

 form and fair," who lured the unwary to de- 

 struction with her wild melody; there are doz- 

 ens of hills around which center legends of 

 Attila the Hun, the heroic Roland and other 

 historic or mythical figures. 



To the Netherlands the Rhine spells neither 

 tradition nor present-day inspiration, but only 

 commerce. Entering the Dutch realm, the river 

 is lost in a delta, the main stream of which, 

 flows into the Meuse and gives to the ships 

 of Rotterdam the opportunity to steam up to 



Diisseldorf, Cologne, Coblenz, Mainz, Frank- 

 fort-on-the-Main, Mannheim and Strassburg, 

 and to share in the trade of those great cities. 

 Until 1831 the Netherlands took advantage of 

 its control of the Rhine mouths to prevent the 

 shipping of other countries from entering the 

 river. C.H.H. 



Consult Mackinder's The Rhine; Hugo's The 

 Rhine ; Clapp's The Navigable Rhine. 



RHINOCEROS, rinos'eros, a huge, ungainly 

 animal which has a thick, loosely-hanging, al- 

 most hairless skin and either one or two broad- 

 based, slightly curved horns projecting upward 

 from its long nose. Its name is made from two 

 Greek words, meaning, literally, nose-horned. 

 Next to the elephant and hippopotamus it is 

 the largest animal, an adult weighing from 4,000 

 to 6,000 pounds. It has an immensely heavy, 

 solid body, clumsy, short legs and a three-toed 

 foot, each toe encased in a separate hoof. It 

 feeds on grass and roots, leafy twigs and shrubs; 

 in captivity, which it endures well, it is very 

 fond of bread, fruits and sweets. The rhinoc- 

 eros is found to-day in a wild state only in 

 Africa, in Southeastern Asia and on a few large 

 islands near the Asiatic coast, but in ages long 

 past it also roamed over Europe. North America 

 and Northern Asia. 



There are five distinct species. The rhinoc- 

 eros most often seen in parks and in menag- 

 eries is the Indian rhinoceros. It has one great, 

 blue-black horn, very thick at the base and 

 between one and two feet long. Its skin hangs 



THE INDIAN RHINOCEROS 

 The African type, differing little in other re- 

 spects, has two horns. 



in such definite folds that the huge beast looks 

 as though it were encased in armor plate. It 

 lives among jungles and dense growths of reeds 

 and grass, on which it feeds at night, while by 

 day it frequents the marshy borders of rivers 

 and lakes. The Indian rhinoceros was well- 



