1812. 
ON THE UNICORN. 
77 
hair, a circumstance which entirely divests of improbability the 
assertion of its being sometimes seen loose, although by no means 
so loose as some writers have supposed. Nor is it at all extraordinary 
that the rhinoceros should possess the power of moving it, to a cer- 
tain degree, since the hog, to which, in a natural arrangement, it 
so closely a pproaches, has a much greater power of moving its 
bristles, which if concreted would form a horn of the same nature. 
With respect to the idea, which I had entertained, of a single horn 
being an anomaly, it arose from the consideration, that all the 
osseous parts of animals, excepting the spine, were in pairs ; those 
which appear single, being in fact divided longitudinally by a suture. 
So that any bony process, such as that which supports the corneous 
case of horned animals, must, to be single or in the central line of 
the face or head, stand over a suture ; a case which no anatomist has 
hitherto discovered in Nature, f The single horn of the rhinoceros, 
is therefore no anomaly ; because, having no connection with, or not 
deriving its origin from, the bones, and being, as I have endeavoured 
to show, only concreted hair. Nature might, if its mode of life re- 
quired, have given it other horns of the same kind on any part of 
the body, without at all disturbing that system and those laws, which 
she has followed in the structure of every quadruped. 
It is this rule of nature, and consequent reasoning, which will 
not allow me to believe that the unicorn, such as we see it re- 
presented, exists any where but in those representations, or in 
imagination : and many circumstances concur to render it highly 
probable, that the name was at first intended for nothing more than 
a species of rhinoceros. 
As we professed to shoot these animals for the advantage prin- 
et cornee, comme si elle etait composee de poils agglutines." Cuvier, Regne Animal, 
tome 1. p. 239. 
f It is scai'cely necessary to remark that the horn (as it is called) of the Sea-Unicorii, 
{Monodon Monoceros) is in reality one of two teeth or tusks, and is inserted on the 
side of the central line, or suture, of the skull ; the other tusk remaining always buried 
within the jaw-bone. So that this unicorn is, in structure, a two-horned animal, and has 
in fact sometimes been found with both tusks grown out to an equal length. 
