In the physical world, some of our secrets are disappearing; and though
Captain Parry failed to find out the pole, and we believe, with that
worthy navigator, that the world have been dreaming from the beginning,
and that there is no pole; and though Captain Ross will go further and
fare worse, yet things are turning up now and then that our most
benevolent scepticism cannot resist. But among other plunders of the
imagination, they are going to rob us of the unicorn. For two thousand
years and upwards, a short date in the history of human quarrel about
nothings, the sages of this world have been doubting and deciding on the
existence of this showy creature. Pliny would have sworn to his having all
but seen it, and he would have sworn that too, if any one had taken the
trouble to ask him. Kircher, and a few of the German naturalists, and
black-letter fools--every naturalist and black-letter man being more or
less a fool--dug up the question out of the pit of Teutonic dulness, and
ever since, every traveller beyond the Needles, has had his theory, which
was quite as good as his fact, and his fact, which was quite as good as
his theory.
The topic perished in Germany, being stifled under professor Bopp and
Sanscrit, Professor Semler and Scepticism, Professor Jahn and Jacobinism,
and the whole vast feather-bed suffocation of Professor Kotzebue and
Comedy. But in England it was endeared to us by associations "deep in
every truly British heart," as the chairmen of our tavern parties say over
their third bottle. We had seen it for ages gallantly climbing the
slippery heights of the kingly crown on show boards, carriages,
transparencies, theatres, and the new, matchless, hydropyric, or fiery and
watery fairy palace of Vauxhall. It met us in every material, from the
gilt _confitures_ of Bartholomew fair, to the gold plateau of the "table
laid for sixty," at St. James's. All the dilettanti were immersed in the
great national question of its shape and features. Mr. Barrow, in a
journey of exploration, which extended to three miles beyond the Cape,
believed that he saw it, but strongly doubted its existence. M. Vaillant
never saw it, nor believed that any one ever did, but was as sure of its
existence as if it had slept in his bosom, and been unto him as a daughter.
Mr. Russel had one, which he milked twice a day, and drove in a curricle
to visit the Queen of Madagascar. Doctor Lyall is writing a quarto from
Madagascar, to deny the statement in toto; admitting, however, that there
is a rumour of the being of some nondescript of the kind in the mountains,
somewhat between the size of the elephant and the Shetland pony; but that
he and we think the subject-matter will turn out asinine. But now a Mr.
Ruppell, after a long sojourn in the north-east of Africa, comes at once
to cheer and dishearten us by the discovery, that in Kordofan, if any one
knows where that is, the unicorn exists; stated to be of the size of a
small horse, of the slender make of the gazelle, and furnished with a long,
straight, slender horn in the male, which was wanting in the female.
According to the statements made by various persons, it inhabits the
deserts to the south of Kordofan, is uncommonly fleet, and comes only
occasionally to the Koldagi Heive mountains on the borders of Kordofan.
This, it must be acknowledged, is a sad falling off from the rival of the
lion, that we have honoured so long in the arms of England. But we
sincerely hope, that by the next arrival, it will not degenerate into a
cow, or worse, a goat. But he tells us, that to our knowledge of the
giraffe he has added considerably. He obtained in Nubia and Kordofan five
specimens, two of which were males and three females. He regards the horns
as constituting the principal generic character, they being formed by
distinct bones, united to the frontal and parietal bones by a very obvious
suture, and having throughout the same structure with the other bones. In
both sexes one of these abnormal bones is situated on each branch of the
coronal suture, and the male possesses an additional one placed more
anteriorly, and occupying the middle of the frontal suture. The anomalous
position of this appendage furnishes a complete refutation of the theory
of Camper with regard to the unicorn, that such an occurrence was contrary
to nature, and proves at least the possibility of the existence of such an
animal. Professor Camper is an ass, of course; but when are we to expect
any thing better from the illustrissimi of the land of sour-krout? Give a
Doctor Magnificus his due allowance of the worst tobacco, and the worst
beer in the world, with a ream of half-brown paper, and a Leipsic
catalogue to plunder, and he will in three months write any subject dead--
smother the plainest truth with an accumulation of absurdity, astonishing,
as the work of a creature with but two hands--and prove that the earth is
but a huge oyster, in which Germany is the pearl; or that man is only a
reclaimed baboon, of which all the wit is centered in Weimar.
_Monthly Magazine_.
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