276 ZOOLOGY. 



head is large, the ears long and erect, while the eyes are 

 small and sunken. "The horns, "which are composed of a 

 mass of fine longitudinal threads, or laminae, forming a 

 beautifully hard and solid substance, are not affixed to the 

 skull, but merely attached to the skin, resting, however, in 

 some degree, on a bony protuberance above the nostrils." 

 In size, says Anderssen, the white African rhinoceros is only 

 exceeded by the elephant. A full-grown male (E. simus) 

 measures, from the snout to the extremity of the tail 

 (which is about two feet long), between 14 and 16 feet, 

 with a circumference of 10 or 12. It weighs not less than 

 4000 to 5000 pounds. " With its huge body, misshapen head, 

 ungainly legs and feet, and diminutive organs of vision, 

 the rhinoceros is the very image of ugliness" (Anderssen's 

 " Lake Ngami "). In strength also the rhinoceros is scarcely 

 inferior to the elephant; and ungainly and heavy as it 

 looks, is very active and swift of foot, so that, as Gordon 

 dimming says, "a horse with a rider can rarely manage 

 to overtake it." Its food consists of vegetables, shoots of 

 trees, grasses, etc. It has but one young at a birth, which 

 is about the size of a dog, and with the merest rudiments of 

 horns. Anderssen says that a common leaden ball will find 

 its way through the hide with the greatest facility. A 

 rhinoceros contemporary with early European man formerly 

 inhabited England, France, and Germany, and extended 

 into Siberia. 



A number of fossil forms lead up to the family compris- 

 ing the horse, ass, zebra, and quagga, etc., in which there 

 is a single toe, being the third on each limb. Their den- 

 tition is — 



The genealogy or series of ancestral extinct Ungulates 

 leading from tapir-like forms to the modern horse has b^en 

 worked out partly by Huxley, and especially by Marsh, who 

 has with Leidy discovered si large series of remains in the 



