182 AFRICAN NATURE NOTES CHAP. 



But is there any authority for such a charge ? 

 Harris says: "Nineteen times out of twenty shall 

 you see the crusty old fellow standing listlessly in 

 the society of gnoos, quaggas, and hartebeests " ; and 

 I myself have often seen black rhinoceroses drinking 

 peaceably in close proximity to buffaloes and other 

 animals. 



Mr. William Cotton Oswell, who between the 

 years 1844 and 1853 made five hunting expeditions 

 into the interior of South Africa, met with and shot 

 great numbers of rhinoceroses of both the black and 

 the white species. In one season alone, he and his 

 companion Mr. Vardon shot no less than eighty-nine 

 of these animals. Oswell, who was a man of a very 

 bold and fearless disposition, was badly injured by 

 a black rhinoceros on one occasion, and on another 

 had his horse gored to death by a wounded animal 

 of the white species. 



It is worthy of remark, I think, that Harris took 

 the correct view that all the prehensile -lipped 

 rhinoceroses he encountered belonged to one and 

 the same species, although showing individually 

 very great divergencies in the relative length of 

 the two horns. In a footnote to his description of 

 the black rhinoceros he says : " In no two speci- 

 mens of this animal which came under my observa- 

 tion were the horns built exactly upon the same 

 model. Disease or accident had not unfrequently 

 rendered the anterior horn the shorter of the two." 



Oswell, however, as well as many other travellers 

 and hunters, adopted the native view that those pre- 

 hensile-lipped rhinoceroses in which the posterior 

 horn was equal or nearly equal in length to the 

 anterior belonged to a distinct species, and in view 

 of the fact that all naturalists and sportsmen are 

 now agreed that all prehensile -lipped rhinoceroses 

 throughout Africa belong to one and the same 

 species, the differences in their horns being merely 



