8510 



Quadrupeds. 



lived about forty -five years in captivity in Barrackpore Park. I have 

 repeatedly seen the pair when alive, many years ago, and remarked 

 that they showed no secondary sexual diversity, being exactly of the 

 same size and general appearance. They never bred ; and I have 

 been informed that a pair of tapirs similarly kept for many years t in 

 Batavia, showed no disposition to propagate their species. They 

 should, of course, have been separated for a time now and then, and 

 again put together. We learn from this Calcutta Medical College 

 specimen and others, that the two forms of skull presented by the 

 Asiatic species of rhinoceros are not indicative of sex, as might 

 probably have been suspected. 



So far as I can learn, the R. sumatranus is the only existing species 

 of rhinoceros which presents secondary sexual distinctions ; inasmuch 

 as the horns of the male are very considerably more developed 

 than those of the female. It further differs from the four existing 

 African species of two-horned rhinoceros, not only by possessing 

 slight skin-folds, but also by having the bases of the horns separated 

 by a considerable interval : Bell's figure, in the ' Philosophical Trans- 

 actions ' for 1793, represents, as 1 believe, their full development in an 

 adult female, as shown likewise in a Tenesserim stuffed head in the 

 Society's Museum, already referred to ; and over Bell's figure of the 

 skull of a male are represented in outline the horns of an ordinary 

 male, not quite so fine, however, as those upon Col. Fytche's speci- 

 men, and that officer informs me that he has possessed a head with 

 still finer horns, some five or six inches longer. Unfortunately, fine 

 horns of R. sumatranus are exceedingly difficult to procure, as they 

 are eagerly bought up at high prices by the China men, who not only 

 value them as medicines, but carve them into very elegant ornaments.* 

 Still the horns which Dr. Salomon Miiller figures, upon what he calls 

 an adult male, are small ; and when I was at Pahpoon, amid the forests 

 of the Yunzalin district of Upper Martaban, in November last, an 

 animal of this species was killed within five miles of me ; but I did 

 not learn of this in time, and was only able to procure the facial bones 

 with the two horns. From their size and appearance I took them to 

 be the horns of rather a juvenile male, but, on cleaning the bone, the 



* The anterior horn of Colonel Fytche's specimen is worth, I was told, about fifty 

 rupees, or £5. I have seen a pair beautifully carved and polished, and set with the 

 bases upwards, in a black wooden frame similar to the stands on which Chinese 

 metallic mirrors are mounted, and am sure now that they were the two horns of one 

 individual of R. suraatrauus, of about the same development as those upon Colonel 

 Fytche's specimen. 



