vi. HORNS AND ANTLERS. 



points may reach and pierce the shoulder, and then 

 drawing them fiercely back, inflicts most formidable gashes. 

 And Anderson's man Hans informed him of an instance 

 where a lion and an oryx the beauty of whose long, sharp, 

 straight or slightly curving jet-black horns you may see 

 any day at the Zoo were found lying dead in each other's 

 grasp, the antelope having with his horns transfixed his 

 powerful assailant. Indeed, Mr. Gumming on one occasion 

 narrowly escaped being himself transfixed. He had 

 wounded a gemsbok, and foolishly approached her without 

 firing again. Lowering her sharp horns, she made a 

 desperate rush towards him, and would inevitably have run 

 him through had not her strength failed her. She stag- 

 gered forward, and fell to the ground within a few feet of 

 the hunter. 



Before passing to the antlered deer, I will say a word or 

 two about the great nose-horns of the rhinoceros. These 

 too are formed of a dense and solid mass of hairs cemented 

 and glued together ; only the hairs, instead of being, like 

 true hairs, developed in little pouches or pits of the skin 

 with a minute pimple or papilla at the bottom, grow from 

 a cluster of much larger and longer papillae projecting on 

 the surface of the nose, while the horny mass which 

 cements the hairs together is formed in the spaces between 

 the papilla?. The nose-horn of the rhinoceros is thus a 

 solid mass of agglutinated hairs, and is not supported on a 

 bony core like that within the brow-horns of the ox. But, 

 like the horns of cattle, these long sharp spears are used 

 as weapons. These the rhinoceros will use even against 

 the giant elephant ; and an instance is described where a 

 rhinoceros, having driven his horn up to the base into the 

 body of an elephant, and being unable to extricate it from 

 the wound, died, crushed by the weight of his huge 

 antagonist. 



