There appear to be three living species of rhinoceros: 1. That of India,
a unicorn, with a rugose coat, and with incisors, separated, by a space,
from the grinders. 2. That of the Cape, a bicorn, the skin without rugæ,
and having twenty eight grinders, and no incisors. 3. That of Sumatra, a
bicorn, the skin but slightly rugose, thus far resembling that of the
Cape, but having incisive teeth, like that of India. The fossil remains
of the rhinoceros have been generally found in the same countries where
the remains of elephants have been found; but they do not appear to have
so generally excited attention; and, perhaps, but few of those who
discovered them were able to determine to what animal they belonged.
Thus a tooth of this animal is described by Grew merely as the tooth of
a terrestrial animal; and the remains of this animal, found in the
neighborhood of Canterbury, were supposed to have belonged to the
hippopotamus. The first remains of this species, of which positive
mention is made, were collected in England, in 1668, near Canterbury, in
the course of digging a well. In 1751, a large number of bones of this
kind were disinterred in the chain of the Hartz, and their form caused
them at first to be taken for those of elephants; but the celebrated
anatomist, Meckel, having compared one of the teeth found in this heap
with the teeth of the living rhinoceros he had observed at Paris,
proved, in an explicit manner, and by the same method which has yielded
us such knowledge of lost species, that the bones found in the Hartz
were the bones of the rhinoceros. Thence the path was clearly opened for
all the paleontological researches on this kind of fossil. Twenty years
after the discovery made on the slopes of the Hartz, a much more
extraordinary discovery, of which Siberia was the scene, threw a truly
striking light upon the question. A fossil rhinoceros, not reduced to
bones alone, but entire, with its skin, was found in the month of
December, 1771, on the borders of the Wiluji, a river which flows into
the Lena, below Yakoutsk, in Siberia, in the forty-fourth degree of
latitude. What characterized this individual, which was covered with
hair, proves that the species to which it belonged, differing from that
of warm countries, the only one we now know, was created to inhabit cold
and temperate regions. Unfortunately, the skin of this precious animal
has not been preserved. Since that time, constant attempts have been
made to discover the bones of the rhinoceros, in a multitude of
countries of northern Europe and Asia; and M. Cuvier, in his “Researches
on Fossil Bones,” has given minute descriptions of them; but
unfortunately, no individual as complete as that of Wiluji has since
been discovered.