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 {R. sinnis) 
measures, from the snout to the extremity of tlie 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 
Gumming 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 been 
worked out partly by Huxley, and especially by Marsh, who 
has with Leidy discovered a large series of remains in the 
