In following the trail of the African unicorn I have neglected chronology and ignored important developments in other parts of the world. The nineteenth century studied the unicorn chiefly “in the field”, yet there were a few scholars of the old school who still preferred the methods of the library. E. A. W. Zimmermann, after reviewing all the evidence available in 1780 to a patient German polymath, concluded that the unicorn legend must be founded upon zoological fact. The French geographer Malte-Brun was deeply impressed by the rumours of unicorns emanating in his time from almost the whole continent of Africa, and he decided that although the existence of the animal had not been proved it was certainly not impossible. He said, furthermore–and I think he was the first to express this modern view–that whether unicorns were to be found in Nature or not, the legend concerning them was interesting and worthy of study for its own sake. H. F. Link, a scholar of extraordinary caution and thoughtfulness, reached the conclusion, after many pages of argument, that the unicorn must be accepted as an actual though perhaps an extinct and certainly a very rare animal.
Among these productions of the library one of the most interesting is the Notice en refutation de la non-existence de la licorne, by J. F. Laterrade, a professional scientist of literary talent. This monograph is well written and ingenious though not convincing. The author does not assert that unicorns exist but contents himself with arguing that they are not only possible but even probable. In the first place, he says, the description of the animal is in no way fabulous and it contains nothing contrary to Nature; secondly, many authors of repute have written about it in full belief; thirdly, no proof has been found that it does not exist. One does not feel that French acumen is well represented in this argument, for each of Laterrade’s three points lies open to attack. Any comparative anatomist would deny his first assertion, which no contemporary and countryman of Cuvier should have allowed himself to make. The historian could name a hundred exploded fallacies that have been supported by authors of repute. As for the third point, absence of disproof is no great assistance toward belief. One might write the word “witches” in place of Laterrade’s “unicorns” and get the same results.
In the year after that in which Laterrade’s monograph appeared Cuvier himself attempted to give the unicorn the coup de grace. He was probably the first of all the writers on our topic who had scientific knowledge adequate to the problems involved, and, in addition, a clear mind of the highest order. Cuvier is strongly inclined to think the unicorn a fairy tale, although he does not positively affirm this. He believes that it was compounded out of the oryx and the rhinoceros. Speaking as a scientist, he says that any horn growing single would be perfectly symmetrical, and that no such horn has ever been found. A cloven-hoofed ruminant with a single horn, moreover, would be impossible, in his opinion, because its frontal bone would be divided and no horn could grow above the division.
And yet the unicorn legend continued to show surprising vitality, quite as many reports and rumours concerning the animal coming from the Orient as from Africa. Captain Samuel Turner, writing in the first year of the nineteenth century, records an interesting conversation with the Rajah of Bootan. “He had a very curious creature, he told me, then in his possession; a sort of horse, with a horn growing from the middle of his forehead. He had once another of the same species, but it died. I could not discover from whence it came, or obtain any other explanation than burra dure! a great way off! I expressed a very earnest desire to see a creature so curious and uncommon, and told him that we had representations of an animal called an unicorn, to which his description answered; but it was generally considered as fabulous. He again assured me of the truth of what he told me, and promised I should see it. It was some distance from Tassisudon, and his people paid it religious respect; but I never had a sight of it.” This is an impressive story, but the force of it is somewhat weakened by the paragraph just preceding, in which the Rajah tells his English visitor about a race of men with short, straight tails, so inconvenient that they were obliged to dig small holes for them before they could sit down.
The Quarterly Magazine for December, 1820, quotes a letter from a Major Latter, stationed in the hill country east of Nepal, asserting that the unicorn had been discovered at last in Tibet. The Major writes: “In a Thibetan manuscript which I procured the other day from the hills, the unicorn is classed under the head of those animals whose hoofs are divided; it is called the one-horned tso’po. Upon inquiring what kind of animal it was, to our astonishment the person who brought me the manuscript described exactly the unicorn of the ancients, saying that it was a native of the interior of Thibet, fierce, and extremely wild, seldom ever caught alive, but frequently shot, and that the flesh was used for food. The person who gave me this account has repeatedly seen these animals and eaten flesh of them. They go together in herds, like our wild buffaloes, and are very frequently met with on the borders of the great desert about a month’s journey from Lassa, in that part of the country inhabited by the wandering Tartars.” The Asiatic journal, after quoting this letter in December of the following year, remarks: “Our readers are aware that steps have been taken to obtain a complete specimen of the animal supposed to be the unicorn, which is said to exist in considerable numbers in Thibet.” Seven years later the same periodical reported that Major Latter was still hunting for the unicorn but had nearly given up hope.
The most famous of earlier travellers in Tibet seems never to have had any doubts. “The unicorn”, says Huc, “which has long been regarded as a fabulous creature, really exists in Thibet. You find it frequently represented in the sculptures and paintings of the Buddhist temples. Even in China you often see it in the landscapes that ornament the inns of the northern provinces. The inhabitants of Adtaa spoke of it without attaching to it any greater importance than to the other species of antelopes which abound in their mountains. We have not been fortunate enough, however, to see the unicorn during our travels in Upper Asia.”
All this testimony regarding the unicorns of Tibet is illumined by a passage in Colonel Prejevalsky’s Mongolia, which throws a beam of light, also, along the whole course of the unicorn legend as we have traced it from the Indica of Ctesias. This passage is concerned with a small, fleet, and very quarrelsome Tibetan antelope known to the Mongols as the orongo and to science as Antholops Hodgsoni. It has slightly recurving black horns, twenty-three inches long, with rings on the anterior surfaces. Prejevalsky says that “the orongo is held sacred by Mongols and Tangutans, and lamas will not touch the meat. The blood is said to possess medicinal virtues, and the horns are used in charlatanism: Mongols tell fortunes and predict future events by the rings on these, and they also serve to mark out the burial places, or more commonly the circles within which the bodies of deceased lamas are exposed: these horns are carried away in large numbers by pilgrims returning from Thibet and are sold at high prices. Mongols tell you that a whip-handle made from one will prevent a rider’s steed from tiring. Another prevalent superstition is that the orongo has only one horn growing vertically from the centre of the head. In Kan-su and Koko-nor we were told that unicorns were rare, one or two in a thousand; but the Mongols in Tsaidam, who are perfectly well acquainted with the orongo, deny entirely the existence there of a one-horned antelope, though admitting that it might be found in South-western Thibet. Had we gone farther we should probably have heard that it was only to be found in India, and so on till we arrived at the one-horned rhinoceros.”
In the middle of the nineteenth century it was still possible for intelligent people to believe in the unicorn’s existence; indeed, if the written records are a trustworthy indication, there seems to have been almost as much belief in the animal at that time as there had been two hundred years earlier, and decidedly more than in the eighteenth century. An amusing evidence of the public interest in the problem is found in a provincial English newspaper: “An Italian gentleman, named Barthema [Lewis Vartoman] said to be entitled to implicit credit, who has just returned from Africa, states that he saw two unicorns at Mecca which had been sent as a present from the King of Ethiopia to the Sultan.” This report was of course exactly true, and the only fault that could be found with it was that the news it contained was somewhat over three hundred years old. One of the foremost French archaeologists of the century went out of his way to declare his faith. “In spite of my unfitness to judge in such matters”, wrote Charles Cahier, “and in spite of the formal denial by the learned Cuvier of all unicorns past or future, I admit that I do not despair of this animal which is so cried down at present after so many panegyrics. The horn may be movable or not, it may be persistent or caducous, for all this is not important; but I dare to hope that it will be single. The unicorn will have a place in our museums beside the ornithorhyncus, which was quite as improbable as the other before it was brought before us; or he may be placed near the pterodactyls, which would have seemed absurd until the moment when they were found.” A scholarly English writer of even more recent date conjectures that the unicorn may be “a hybrid produced occasionally and at more or less rare intervals, a cross between some equine and cervine species.” Or the word “unicorn” may be “a generic name for several distinct species of (probably) now extinct animals–creatures which were the contemporaries of prehistoric man and which, before they finally expired, attracted the attention of his descendants, during early historic time, by the rare appearance of a few surviving individuals.”
(1930)
Public domain. Source: The Lore of the Unicorn, Sacred Text Archive.