Part 29 (1/2)
The _Rhinoceros_, which made its appearance in the Miocene period, appears in greater numbers in the Pliocene deposits. The species peculiar to the Tertiary epoch is _R. tichorhinus_, which is descriptive of the bony part.i.tion which separated its two nostrils, an anatomical arrangement which is not found in our existing species. Two horns surmount the nose of this animal, as represented in Fig. 175. Two living species, namely, the Rhinoceros of Africa and Sumatra, have two horns, but they are much smaller than those of _R. tichorhinus_. The existing Indian Rhinoceros has only one horn.
The body of _R. tichorhinus_ was covered with very thick hair, and its skin was without the rough and callous scales which we remark on the skin of the living African species.
Contemporaneously with this gigantic species there existed a dwarf species about the size of our Hog; and along with it several intermediate species, whose bones are found in sufficient numbers to enable us to reconstruct the skeleton. The curvature of the nasal bone of the fossil Rhinoceros and its gigantic horn have given rise to many tales and popular legends. The famous bird, the _Roc_, which played so great a part in the fabulous myths of the people of Asia, originated in the discovery in the bosom of the earth of the cranium and horns of a fossil Rhinoceros. The famous dragons of western tradition have a similar origin.
In the city of Klagenfurth, in Carinthia, is a fountain on which is sculptured the head of a monstrous dragon with six feet, and a head surmounted by a stout horn. According to the popular tradition still prevalent at Klagenfurth, this dragon lived in a cave, whence it issued from time to time to frighten and ravage the country. A bold cavalier kills the dragon, paying with his life for this proof of his courage. It is the same legend which is current in every country, from that of the valiant St. George and the Dragon and of St. Martha, who nearly about the same age conquered the fabulous _Tarasque_ of the city of Languedoc, which bears the name of Tarascon.
But at Klagenfurth the popular legend has happily found a mouth-piece--the head of the pretended dragon, killed by the valorous knight, is preserved in the Hotel de Ville, and this head has furnished the sculptor for his fountain with a model for the head of his statue.
Herr Unger, of Vienna, recognised at a glance the cranium of the fossil Rhinoceros; its discovery in some cave had probably originated the fable of the knight and the dragon. And all legends are capable of some such explanation when we can trace them back to their sources, and reason upon the circ.u.mstances on which they are founded.
The traveller Pallas gives a very interesting account of a _Rhinoceros tichorhinus_ which he saw, with his own eyes, taken out of the ice in which its skin, hair, and flesh had been preserved. It was in December, 1771, that the body of the Rhinoceros was observed buried in the frozen sand upon the banks of the Viloui, a river which discharges itself into the Lena below Yakutsk, in Siberia, in 64 north lat.i.tude. ”I ought to speak,” the learned naturalist says, ”of an interesting discovery which I owe to the Chevalier de Bril. Some Yakouts hunting this winter near the Viloui found the body of a large unknown animal. The Sieur Ivan Argounof, inspector of the Zimovic, had sent on to Irkutsk the head and a fore and hind foot of the animal, all very well preserved.” The Sieur Argounof, in his report, states that the animal was half buried in the sand; it measured as it lay three ells and three-quarters Russian in length, and he estimated its height at three and a half; the animal, still retaining its flesh, was covered with skin which resembled tanned leather; but it was so decomposed that he could only remove the fore and hind foot and the head, which he sent to Irkutsk, where Pallas saw them.
”They appeared to me at first glance,” he says, ”to belong to a Rhinoceros; the head especially was quite recognisable, since it was covered with its leathery skin, and the skin had preserved all its external characters, and many short hairs. The eyelids had even escaped total decay, and in the cranium here and there, under the skin, I perceived some matter which was evidently the remains of putrefied flesh. I also remarked in the feet the remains of the tendons and cartilages where the skin had been removed. The head was without its horn, and the feet without hoofs. The place of the horn, and the raised skin which had surrounded it, and the division which existed in both the hind and fore feet, were evident proofs of its being a Rhinoceros. In a dissertation addressed to the Academy of St. Petersburg, I have given a full account of this singular discovery. I give there reasons which prove that a Rhinoceros had penetrated nearly to the Lena, in the most northern regions, and which have led to the discovery of the remains of other strange animals in Siberia. I shall confine myself here to a description of the country where these curious remains were found, and to the cause of their long preservation.
”The country watered by the Viloui is mountainous; all the stratification of these mountains is horizontal. The beds consist of selenitic and calcareous schists and beds of clay, mixed with numerous beds of pyrites. On the banks of the Viloui we meet with coal much broken; probably coal-beds exist higher up near to the river. The brook Kemtendo skirts a mountain entirely formed of selenite or crystallised sulphate of lime and of rock-salt, and this mountain of alabaster is more than 300 versts (about 200 miles), in ascending the Viloui, from the place where the Rhinoceros was found. Opposite to the place we see, near the river, a low hill, about a hundred feet high, which, though sandy, contains some beds of millstone. The body of the Rhinoceros had been buried in coa.r.s.e gravelly sand near this hill, and the nature of the soil, which is always frozen, had preserved it. The soil near the Viloui never thaws to a great depth, for, although the rays of the sun soften the soil to the depth of two yards in the more elevated sandy places, in the valleys, where the soil is half sand and half clay, it remains frozen at the end of summer half an ell below the surface.
Without this intense cold the skin of the animal and many parts of it would long since have perished. The animal could only have been transported from some southern country to the frozen north at the epoch of the Deluge, for the most ancient chronicles speak of no changes of the globe more recent, to which we could attribute the deposit of these remains and of the bones of elephants which are found dispersed all over Siberia.”[92]
[92] ”Pallas's Voyage,” vol. iv., pp. 130-134.
In this extract the author refers to a memoir previously published by himself, in the ”Commentarii” of the Academy of St. Petersburg. This memoir, written in Latin, and ent.i.tled ”Upon some Animals of Siberia,”
has never been translated. After some general considerations, the author thus relates the circ.u.mstances attending the discovery of the fossil Rhinoceros, with some official doc.u.ments affirming their correctness, and the manner in which the facts were brought under his notice by the Governor of Irkutsk, General Bril: ”The skin and tendons of the head and feet still preserved considerable flexibility, imbued as it were with humidity from the earth; but the flesh exhaled a fetid ammoniacal odour, resembling that of a latrine. Compelled to cross the Bakal Lake before the ice broke up, I could neither draw up a sufficiently careful description nor make sketches of the parts of the animal; but I made them place the remains, without leaving Irkutsk, upon a furnace, with orders that after my departure they should be dried by slow degrees and with the greatest care, continuing the process for some time, because the viscous matter which incessantly oozed out could only be dissipated by great heat. It happened, unfortunately, that during the operation the posterior part of the upper thigh and the foot were burnt in the overheated furnace, and they were thrown away; the head and the extremity of the hind foot only remained intact and undamaged by the process of drying. The odour of the softer parts, which still contained viscous matter in their interior, was changed by the desiccation into one resembling that of flesh decomposed in the sun.
”The Rhinoceros to which the members belonged was neither large for its species nor advanced in age, as the bones of the head attest, yet it was evidently an adult from the comparison made of the size of the cranium as compared with that of others of the same species more aged, which were afterwards found in a fossil state in divers parts of Siberia. The entire length of the head from the upper part of the nape of the neck to the extremity of the denuded bone of the jaw was thirty inches; the horns were not with the head, but we could still see evident vestiges of two horns, the nasal and frontal. The front, unequal and a little protuberant between the orbits, and of a rhomboidal egg-shape, is deficient in the skin, and only covered by a light h.o.r.n.y membrane, bristling with straight hairs as hard as horn.
”The skin which covers the greater part of the head is in the dried state, a tenacious, fibrous substance, like curried leather, of a brownish-black on the outside and white in the inside; when burnt, it had the odour of common leather; the mouth, in the place where the lips should have been soft and fleshy, was putrid and much lacerated; the extremities of the maxillary bone were bare. Upon the left side, which had probably been longest exposed to the air, the skin was here and there decomposed and rubbed on the surface; nevertheless, the greater part of the mouth was so well preserved on the right side that the pores, or little holes from which doubtless the hairs had fallen, were still visible all over that side, and even in front. In the right side of the jaw there were still in certain places numerous hairs grouped in tufts, for the most part rubbed down to the roots, and here and there of two or three lines still retaining their full length. They stand erect, are stiff, and of an ashy colour, but with one or two black, and a little stiffer than the others, in each bunch.
”What was most astonis.h.i.+ng, however, was the fact that the skin which covered the orbits of the eyes, and formed the eyelids, was so well preserved and so healthy that the openings of the eyelids could be seen, though deformed and scarcely penetrable to the finger; the skin which surrounded the orbits, though desiccated, formed circular furrows. The cavities of the eyes were filled with matter, either argillaceous or animal, such as still occupied a part of the cavity of the cranium.
Under the skin the fibres and tendons still remained, and above all the remains of the temporal muscles; finally, in the throat hung some great bundles of muscular fibres. The denuded bones were young and less solid than in other fossil crania of the same species. The bone which gave support to the nasal horn was not yet attached to the _vomer_; it was unprovided with articulations like the processes of the young bones. The extremities of the jaws preserved no vestige either of teeth or sockets, but they were covered here and there with the remains of the integument. The first molar was distant about four inches from the extreme edge of the jaw.
”The foot which remains to me, and which, if I am not mistaken, belongs to the left hind limb, has not only preserved its skin quite intact and furnished with hairs, or their roots, as well as the tendons and ligaments of the heel in all their strength, but also the skin itself quite whole as far as the bend in the knee. The place of the muscles was filled with black mud. The extremity of the foot is cloven into three angles, the bony parts of which, with the periosteum, still remain here and there; the h.o.r.n.y hoofs had been detached. The hairs adhering in many places to the skin were from one to three lines in length, tolerably stiff and ash-coloured. What remains of it proves that the foot was covered with bunches of hair, which hung down.
”We have never, so far as I know, observed so much hair on any rhinoceros which has been brought to Europe in our times, as appears to have been presented by the head and feet we have described. I leave you then to decide if our rhinoceros of the Lena was born or not in the temperate climate of Central Asia. In fact, the rhinoceros, as I gather from the relations of travellers, belongs to the forests of Northern India; and it is likely enough that these animals differ in a more hairy skin from those which live in the burning zones of Africa, just in the same way that other animals of a hotter climate are less warmly covered than those of the same genera in temperate countries.”[93]
[93] ”Commentarii Academiae Petersburgicae,” p. 3.
Of all fossil ruminants one of the largest and most singular is the _Sivatherium_, whose remains have been found in the valley of Murkunda, in the Sewalik branch of the Sub-Himalayan Mountains. Its name is taken from that of Siva, the Indian deity wors.h.i.+pped in that part of India.
The _Sivatherium giganteum_ had a body as bulky as that of an ox, and bore a sort of resemblance to the living Elk. It combined in itself the characteristics of different kinds of Herbivores, at the same time that it was marked by individual peculiarities. The ma.s.sive head possessed four deciduous, hollow horns, like the p.r.o.ngbuck; two front ones conical, smooth, and rapidly rising to a point, and two hinder ones of larger size, and branched, projected forward above the eyes.[94] Thus it differed from the deer, whose solid horns annually drop off, and from the antelope tribe, sheep and oxen, whose hollow horns are persistent, and resembled only one living ruminant, the p.r.o.ngbuck, in having had hollow horns subject to shedding. Fig. 176 is a representation of the _Sivatherium_ restored, in so far, at least, as it is possible to do so in the case of an animal of which only the cranium and a few other bones have been discovered.
[94] Dr. James Murie, _Geological Magazine_, vol. viii., p. 438.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 176.--Sivatherium restored.]
As if to rival these gigantic Mammals, great numbers of Reptiles seem to have lived in the Pliocene period, although they are no longer of the same importance as in the Secondary epoch. Only one of these, however, need occupy our attention, it is the _Salamander_. The living Salamanders are amphibious Batrachians, with smooth skins, and rarely attaining the length of twenty inches. The Salamander of the Tertiary epoch had the dimensions of a Crocodile; and its discovery opens a pregnant page in the history of geology. The skeleton of this Reptile was long considered to be that of a human victim of the deluge, and was spoken of as ”_h.o.m.o diluvii testis_.” It required all the efforts of Camper and Cuvier to eradicate this error from the minds of the learned, and probably in the minds of the vulgar it survived them both.
Upon the left bank of the Rhine, not far from Constance, a little above Stein, and near the village of ningen, in Switzerland, there are some fine quarries of schistose limestone. In consequence of their varied products these quarries have often been described by naturalists; they are of Tertiary age, and were visited, among others, by Horace de Saussure, by whom they are described in the third volume of his ”Voyage dans les Alpes.”