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 laminas, forming a 

 beantifnlly 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 tlie elephant. A full-grown male (i?. simus) 

 measures, from the snout to tlie extremity of the tail 

 (which is abont 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, 

 tlie rhinoceros is the very image of ngliness" (Anderssen's 

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

 inferior to the elephant; and ungainly and lieavy as it 

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

 Camming 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, whicli 

 is abf)ut the size of a dog, and with the merest rudiments of 

 lujrns. 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 tlie horse, ass, zebra, and qnagga, etc., in which tliere 

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

 tition is — 



jfi n 1-1 P'*-^ ,,3-3 



The genealogy or series of ancestral extinct Ungulates 

 leading from tapirdike forms to the modei'n horse has been 

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

 lias with Leidy discovered a large series of remains in the 



