The Unicorn seems to have been a sad puzzle to the hunters, who hardly knew how to come at so valuable a piece of game. It was how• ever at last discovered that it was fond of rarities, and particularly attached to chaste persons ; ao they took the field with a virgin, who was placed •in the unsuspecting admirer's way. When the Unicorn spied her, he approached with all reverence, couched beside her, and, laying his head in her lap, fell asleep. The treacherous virgin then gave a signal, and the hunters made in and captured the simple beast.
Modern zoologists, disgusted, as they well may be, with fables of which we have only given a specimen or two, disbelieve generally the existence of the Unicorn, such at least as we have above referred to ; but the result of 31. Guettard's dissertation is an opinion that some terrestrial animal bearing a horn on the anterior part of its head exists besides the Rhinoceros. The nearest approach to a horn in the middle of the forehead of any terrestrial mammiferous animal known to us is the bony protuberance on the forehead of the Giraffe [Gruessa, in NAT. HIST. Dry.] ; and, though it would be presumptuoua to deny the existence of a one-horned quadruped other than the Rhinoceros, it may be safely stated that the insertion of a long and solid horn in the living forehead of a horse-like or deer-like cranium is as near an impossibility as anything can be.
The " Monoceros borne" in Tradescant's collection was probably that which ordinarily has passed for the horn of the Unicorn, namely, the tooth of a Narwhal. Old legends assert that the Unicorn, when he
goes to drink, first dips his horn in the water to purify it, and that other beasts delay to quench their thirst till the Unicorn has thus sweetened the water. The Narwhal'a tooth makes a capital twisted Unicorn's horn, as represented in the old figures. That in the reposi tory of St. Denis, at Paris, was presendid by Thevet, and was declared to have been given to him by the king of Monomotapa, who took him out to hunt unicorns, which are frequent in that country. Some have thought that this horn is a carved elephant's tooth. There is one at Strasburg some seven or eight feet in length, and there are several in Venice.
Great medical virtues were attributed to the so-called horn, and the price it once bore outdoes everything except the Tulipomania. A Floren tine physician has recorded that a pound of it (sixteen ounces) was sold in the shops for fifteen hundred and thirty-six crowns, when the same weight in gold would only have brought one hundred and forty-eight crowns.
The Unicorn is a national symbol with us, for it is one of the sup porters of the royal arms of Great Britain, in that posture termed by heralds " saillant.' It was introduced as one of the supporters of the English arms by James I., who having as king of Scotland borne two unicorns, coupled one of them with the English lion on his accession to the throne of England.