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The Animal-Lore of Shalcspeare’s Time . 
purpose of alluring the unicorn, but this statement gives 
the animal little credit for shrewdness. Topsell writes:— 
“ These beasts are very swift, and their legges have not articles,, 
They keep for the most part in the desarts, and live solitary in the 
tops of the mountaines. There was nothing more horible then the 
voice or braying of it, for the voice is straind above measure. It 
fighteth both with the mouth and with the ^heeles, with the mouth 
biting like a lyon, and with the heeles kicking like a horse.” 
(Page 719.) 
Sir Thomas Browne, writing half a century later, 
doubts the existence of such an animal, in spite of this 
precise account; but he mentions five kinds of one¬ 
horned animals—the Indian ass, the Indian ox, the 
rhinoceros, the oryx, and the monoceros or unicornis, 
which last may have been the narwhal. 
Thomas Fuller dwells at some length on the vexed 
question of the unicorn’s existence, but adds little of 
value to the controversy. That such a creature lived at 
one time he considers clearly proved by the mention of 
it in Scripture, and as the belief then was that no species 
could be wholly lost, it was clear to Fuller that the 
unicorn was to be met with somewhere. With regard to 
the horn, he writes:— 
“ Some are plain, as that in St. Mark’s in Venice; others wreathed 
about, as that at Dyonis near Paris, with anfractuous spires, and 
cocleary turnings about it, which probably is the effect of age, those 
wreaths being but the wrinkles of most vivacious unicorns. The 
same may be said of the colour, white, when newly taken from his 
head; yellow, like that lately in the Tower, of some hundred years 
seniority; but whether or no it will ever turn black, as that of 
Plinie’s description, let others decide.” ( Worthies, vol. ii. p. 54.) 
The Rev. Edward Topsell visits with true ecclesiastical 
scorn those sceptical mortals who refuse to accept the 
traditional accounts of the unicorn, and even dare to 
doubt its existence. After enumerating the different 
