UNICORN, a fabulous beast, usually having the head and body of a horse, the hind legs of an antelope, the tail of a lion (sometimes horse's tail), sometimes the beard of a goat, and as its chief feature a long, sharp, twisted horn, similar to the narwhal's tusk, set in the middle of its forehead (Lat. Unicornis, single horned, Gr. ,uov6Kfpcos). The earliest description is that of Ctesias, who (Indica opera, ed. Baehr, p. 254) states that there were in India white wild asses celebrated for their fleetness of foot, having on the forehead a horn a cubit and a half in length, coloured white, red and black; from the horn were made drinking cups which were a preventive of poisoning. Aristotle mentions (Hist. anim., ii. 1; De part. anim., iii. 2) two one-horned animals, the oryx, a kind of antelope, and "the so-called Indian ass." In Roman times Pliny (N.H., viii. 3o; xi. io6) mentions the oryx, the Indian ass, and an Indian ox as one-horned ; Aelian (De nat. anim., iii. 41; iv. quoting Ctesias, adds that India produces also a one-horned horse, and says (xvi. 20) that the Monoceros was sometimes called Car cazonort, possibly a form of the Arabic Carcaddn, rhinoceros.
The mediaeval conception of the unicorn as possessing great strength and fierceness is perhaps due to the fact that in certain passages of the Old Testament (e.g., Num. xxiii. 22 ; Deut. xxxiii. 17; Job xxxix. 9-1o) the Hebrew word R'em, now translated in the Revised Version "wild ox," was translated in the Septuagint pcovOicepws, in the Vulgate unicornis or rhinoceros, and in the Au thorised Version "unicorn," though in Deut. xxxiii. 17 it obviously refers to a two-horned animal. Isidore xii. 2, 12 tells how the uni
corn has been known to worst the elephant in combat.
As a decoration on drinking-cups it symbolized the ancient be lief in the efficacy of the unicorn's horn against poison, which in England remained, even in the time of Charles II., though Sir E. Ray Lankester (Science from an Easy Chair, 191o, p. 127) men tions that a cup made of rhinoceros horn was then handed over to the Royal Society for experiment, with the result of entirely dis proving the superstition. In the court ceremonial of France as late as 1789 instruments of "unicorn's" horn were still used for testing the royal food for poison.
In heraldry the unicorn was sometimes used as a device (see HERALDRY), but oftener as a supporter, and subsists to the present day as the left-hand supporter of the royal arms. This position it assumed at the Union, the Scottish royal arms having been supported by two unicorns. When the unicorn be came a supporter of the royal arms both of England and Scotland, a royal crown was added on the head of the unicorn, in addition to the crown with chain and ring round its neck (see Great Seal of James I. and VI. in Anderson, Pl. xciii.), but this crown was removed after the Hanoverian succession. In England after the Union the unicorn became the left-hand supporter, but in Scot land, as late as 1766, it was still put on the right (Seton, p. 442).
Drexler s.v. Monokeros, in Roscher's Lexicon; and Rev. W. Haughton in Annals and Magazine of Natural History for 1862, p. 363 ; see Odell Shepard, The Lore of the Unicorn (193o).