~1 
4 ZOOLOGICAL 
EFFECT OF THE RAZOR-LIKE EDGES OF GRASS 
The author's shoes, before and after a nineteen days march through the 
haunts of the white rhinoceros. The tips, filed away by the gra 
were nailed down again with brass tacks, and the other holes were 
Imagine what such friction does to the horns of 
mended with wire. 
rhinoceroses fending their way through the cutting grass of the jungle, 
is considerable. The heavier development of 
the nasal boss in males allows for relatively 
larger and heavier horns. The one in front 
may be perfectly straight, as in exceptional 
female specimens, or curved slightly forward, 
or bent so far backward as almost to describe 
a semicircle. With advancing age, the part 
immediately above the base is worn away grad- 
ually and the outstanding lower portion shows 
well their bristly makeup of vertical, strongly 
agglutinated hollow fibres. 
The posterior horn is directly behind the 
other, and it may be at a little distance from 
it, as in young specimens. As a rule it is con- 
siderably shorter, roundish, or laterally com- 
pressed. Exceptionally fine horns are not de- 
pendent on great age, but are carried by in- 
dividuals in the prime of life, those of very old 
specimens generally being inferior. 
However seldom these rhinocer- 
Charge oses charge their living enemies, 
a at times bushes, trees, and even 
White boulders may receive the tremen- 
Rhinoceros dous impact of their weight and 
violence. Often in such reckless 
plunges, instead of crushing an imaginary 
foe, they splinter their front horns. In the 
Uele district at least, this is not so rare an 
occurrence, for among sixty waiting at a post to 
be exported to Egypt, half a dozen had been 
injured in this manner. Of two that we obtained 
from our own freshly killed specimens, one 
anterior horn was a mere stub and the other 
only a little higher than the posterior horn. 
Those of younger animals are too short and 
solid to be broken; only the worn-off, slender 
horns of adults are subject to such damage. 
The splintered portion is gradually polished 
SOCIETY 
BULLETIN 
off, but the stumps left probably never change 
much in form. 
From South Africa a single re- 
markably slim front horn of sixty- 
é two and one-half inches, and 
probably from a female, credited to Colonel W. 
Gordon Cumming, breaks all records for length. 
In open plains horns may grow uninjured, but 
they cannot escape the gradual wear from the 
razor-like blades of common grasses, which is 
the most probable way of accounting for their 
slenderness. Perhaps the density of the brush 
and roughness of the ground in the haunts of 
the white rhinoceros west of the Nile do not per- 
mit such excessively long-horn development. 
We were fortunate, however, in obtaining there 
the two largest complete specimens of white 
rhinoceros ever collected, the photographs of 
which are reproduced herewith for the first time. 
One, the bull, had a total length of fifteen feet 
five inches in a straight line from snout to tip 
of the tail, which itself measured thirty-two and 
one-half inches. His standing height at the 
shoulders was five feet eight inches, but at the 
nuchal hump, by raising the neck and pulling 
the forelimb eighteen inches more might have 
been added. 
Meas- 
urements 
While the length of horns pre- 
Height viously known from that region 
1) _ : 5 
April does not exceed three feet, this 
male from Faradje, in the Uele, 
constitutes a record for the northern form 
(C. s. cottoni), with a forty-two inch front and 
twenty-two and one-half inch rear horn. The 
female is an equally remarkable partner, her 
front horn measuring thirty-six and a quarter 
THICK HIDE 
BENEATH. HORNS 
NASAL BONE 
TWO DAYS AFTER BEING SPEARED BY NATIVES 
Decomposition has loosened the mass of minute fibres fastening the 
horns to the skin, which runs without interruption beneath the horns. 
Here a part of the skin one inch thick, has been cut out to show the 
naso-trontal bones below. 
