Fig. 87.—The Sz Target. (From the San Li T’u.)
Fig. 88.—The Too Jou Shen. (From the Ming Tombs.)
Fig. 89.—The Too Jou Shen.
(From the Ming Tombs.)
The Too Jou Shen is the name of an animal with a lion-like body and head, cloven hoofs, and a blunt short horn projecting from the centre of the forehead. Two pairs of these form a portion of the avenue of stone figures of animals leading up to the Ming tombs, about eighty miles north of Pekin. I have not found it described in any book.
A writer in the China Review[309] endeavours to prove that the Ki-Lin is a reminiscence of the giraffe, which he supposes may once have spread over Asia, and, in addition to various passages included among those which I have quoted above, adduces one from the Wu Tsah Tsu, which states that, “In the period Yung Loh of the Ming dynasty (1403-1425) a Ki-Lin was caught, and a painter was ordered to make a sketch and hand it up to the high magistrates. According to the picture, the body was perfectly shaped like that of a deer, but the neck was very long, perhaps three or four feet.” I must admit that I cannot agree with him in his conclusions. Harris[310] has given much better arguments in favour of the unicorn being merely a species of oryx. He appears to me, however, to speak too absolutely, to make his facts too pliant, and to base his main belief on the untenable theory that the myth, tradition, or theory is based on the profile drawing of an oryx, exhibiting one horn only. We might just as soon expect people to start stories of two-legged cows or horses, or one-legged races of men, if so slender a basis for forging a species were sufficient. What the zoological status of the unicorn may be I am not prepared to show, but I find it impossible to believe that a creature whose existence has been affirmed by so many authors, at so many different dates, and from so many different countries, can be, as mythologists demand, merely the symbol of a myth. There is a possible solution, which does not appear to have struck previous writers on the subject, viz., that the unicorn may be merely a hybrid produced occasionally and at more or less rare intervals.
By accepting this view we could explain the extraordinary combinations of character assigned to it, and the discrepancy which exists between the qualities of courage and gentleness ascribed to it by Western and Chinese authors. A valuable chapter remains to be written by naturalists and progressionists on the limits within which hybridization exists in a state of nature among the higher animals; its prevalence among the lower and among plants is, of course, well known. A cross between some equine and cervine species might readily result in a unicorn offspring, and either the courageous qualities of the sire[311] or the gentleness of the dam might preponderate, according to the relations of the species in each of the instances.