the question, Job 39:10, shows that an animal whose home is on the mountains is intended, viz., as Bochart, and recently Schlottm. (making use of an academic treatise of Lichtenstein on the antelopes, 1824), has proved, the oryx, which the lxx also probably understands when it translates μονοκέρως; for the Talmud. קרש, mutilated from it, is, according to Chullin, 59b, a one-horned animal, and is more closely defined as טביא דבי עילאי, “gazelle (antelope) of Be (Beth)-Illâi” (comp. Lewysohn, Zoologie des Talmuds, 1858, §146).
The oryx also appears on Egyptian monuments sometimes with two horns, but mostly with one variously curled; and both Aristotle[1] and Pliny describe it as a one-horned cloven-hoof; so that one must assent to the supposition of a one-horned variety of the oryx (although as a fact of natural history it is not yet fully established), as then there is really tolerably certain information of a one-horned antelope both in Upper Asia and in Central Africa;[2]
- ↑ Vid., Sundevall, Die Thierarten des Aristoteles (Stockholm, 1863), S. 64f.
- ↑ J. W. von Müller (Das Einhorn von gesch. u. naturwiss. Standpunkte betrachtet, 1852) believed that in a horn in the Ambras Collection at Vienna he recognised a horn of the Monocerôs (comp. Fechner's Centralblatt, 1854, Nr. 2), but he is hardly right. J. W. von Müller, Francis Galton (Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa, 1853), and other travellers have heard the natives speak ingenuously of the unicorn, but without seeing it themselves. On the other hand, Huc and Gabet (Journeyings through Mongolia and Thibet, Germ. edition) tell us “a horn of this animal was sent to Calcutta: it was 50 centimetres long and 11 in circumference; from the root it ran up to a gradually diminishing point. It was almost straight, black, etc ... . Hodgson, when English consul at Nepal, had the good fortune to obtain an unicorn ... . It is a kind of antelope, which in southern Thibet, that borders on Nepal, is called Tschiru. Hodgson sent a skin and horn to Calcutta; they came from an unicorn that died in the menagerie of the Raja of Nepal.” The detailed description follows, and the suggestion is advanced that this Antilope Hodgsonii, as it has been proposed to call the Tschiru, is the one-horned oryx of the ancients. The existence of one-horned wild sheep (not antelopes), attested by R. von Schlagintweit (Zoologischer Garten, 1st year, S. 72), the horn of which consists of two parts gradually growing together, covered by one horn-sheath, does not depreciate the credibility of the account given by Huc-Gabet (to which Prof. Will has called my attention as being the most weighty testimony of the time). Another less minute account is to be found in the Arabic description of a journey (communicated to me by Prof. Fleischer) by Selîm Bisteris (Beirût, 1856): In the menagerie of the Viceroy of Egypt he saw an animal of the colour of a gazelle, but the size and form of an ass, with a long straight horn between the ears, and what, as he says, seldom go together) with hoofs, viz. - and as the expression Arab. ḥâfr, horse's hoof (not Arab. chuff, a camel's hoof), also implies - proper, uncloven hoofs, - therefore an one-horned and at the same time one-hoofed antelope.
