4)62 NATURAL HISTORY OF AFRICA. 
ed, as no solitary horns have ever found their way 
into our collections, excepting those of the rhi- 
noceros and narwaL 
" After careful consideration, it is impossible 
that we should give any credit to rude sketches 
made by savages upon rocks. Entirely ignorant 
of perspective, and wishing to represent the out- 
lines of a straight-horned antelope in profile, they 
could only give the figure one ' horn, and thus 
they produced an oryx. The oryxes, too, that 
are seen on the Egyptian monuments, are nothing 
more, probably, than productions .of the stiff style 
imposed on the sculptors of the country by re- 
ligious prejudices. Several of their profiles of 
quadrupeds shew only one fore and one hinder 
leg, and it is probable that the same rule led them 
also to represent only one horn. Perhaps their 
figures may have been copied after individuals 
that had lost one of their horns by accident, a 
circumstance that often happens to the chamois 
and the saiga, species of the antelope genus, and 
this would be quite sufficient to establish the error. 
All the ancients, however, have not represented 
the oryx as having only one horn. Oppian ex- 
pressly attributes two to this animal, and ^'Elian 
mentions one that had four.'^ Finally, if this 
animal was ruminant and cloven-footed, we are 
* ^lian. Anim« XV. U, 
