THE FOEMER RANGE OF THE REINDEER IN EUROPE. 
41 
suppose that Caesar described the animal partly from hearsay 
and partly from a rude sketch in profile. In the latter case, un- 
less the drawing were in correct perspective the animal would 
appear to be possessed of one horn only, and therefore he might 
lemtimatelv describe it in times when a belief in all kinds of 
monsters was current, as possessed of one horn. To this imper- 
fection of drawing many of the monsters in the natural history 
books of the middle ages may most probably be traced. It is 
not at all reasonable to suppose that Csesar himself ever saw a 
reindeer ; for he describes the Hercynian forest as stretching far 
beyond his ken, and then he proceeds to enumerate the animals 
that are found in it. The Grermans, however, in his time were 
well acquainted with the reindeer, for in the 21st ch. of the 6th 
book of his Commentaries he writes that they use small skins of 
reindeer, ^‘Parvis rhenonum tegimentis utuntnr,” — a passage in 
which rhenones is the latinized form of the word that is now 
current as Eennthier (Swedish Eendjur), and which is preserved 
in the Eomance word Eenne, the root meaning being found in the 
Grerman rennen, to run.* When the Teutonic invaders of Europe 
advanced northwards and westwards in the Hercynian forest, they 
met with an animal altogether strange to their eyes. They 
were struck with its running powers, and so they termed it 
the running beast,” and thus the animal acquired a name. 
Other writers of antiquity, such as Pliny, Solinus, and ^lian, 
speak of an animal which they term tarandus ; their accounts, 
however, are purely mythical, and it may have been an elk, or, 
as (xesner believes, a Polish thur, as reasonably as any other 
animal. t In Csesar’s description the uprightness of the horns 
shows that he meant the true reindeer, and not the elk. 
Down, indeed, to the sixteenth century, Csesar’s account is 
not surpassed for accuracy by any other, but for the most part 
formed the basis of all the descriptions of the animal written by the 
mediaeval monks. In the thirteenth century Albertus Magnus, 
Bishop of Eatisbon (died 1280), describes the animal as possessed 
i of three horns ; and Olaus Magnus, | writing nearly three hundred 
years afterwards, adopts his error. He writes that, “in the north, 
on both sides of the Grulf of Bothnia, and in Lapland, there is 
an animal with three horns {hestia tricornis), one of the stags, 
but taller, stouter, and swifter. Two of the horns are larger 
than the rest, and situated in the same place as in the red-deer, 
but they are more branching and more widely extending, even 
* That this is the true derivation is proved hy the prominence which 
Olaus Magus, Albertus Magus, and Gesner give to its attribute of swiftness. 
Dr. Lee derives the name from the German rein, clean, without however 
giving any reason. 
t Historia Naturalis, folio, 1603, vol i. p. 140, 
X Gentium Septentrionalium Historiee lib. xvi. cap. viii. 
