As we before observed, his skin is so extremely hard on his back, &c. that neither arrows nor musket balls can pierce it, but it is thinner on the belly and insides of the thighs, at which parts therefore the hunters constantly aim. They sometimes endeavour to break his leg with large blunderbusses, and if they succeed in that their conquest is certain. The negroes who do not hesitate to attack the sharks and crocodiles, commonly avoid the hippopotamus, and would probably never dare to encounter him, but from a presumption that if they fail he cannot overtake them; those of Angola, Congo, Elmina, and the western coasts of Africa, consider him as an inferior deity, but yet they feel no repugnance in devouring his flesh when they can procure it with safety. The female brings forth among the rushes upon land, but she soon teaches her young to take refuge in the water, and which they do on the smallest alarm. P. Labat asserts, that this animal has sufficient intelligence to let himself blood when he feels a necessity, and that he performs the operation by rubbing a particular part of his skin against a sharp-pointed rock, and that when he thinks he has bled enough he rolls himself in the mud until he has stopped the wound; and it has also been affirmed that the Indian painters make use of his blood as one of their colours. _Engraved for Barr's Buffon_ [Illustration: FIG. 150. _Rein-Deer._] [Illustration: FIG. 149. _Elk._] THE ELK AND THE REIN-DEER. Although the Elk (_fig. 149._) and the Rein-deer (_fig. 150._) are animals of different species, we shall treat of them together, because it is scarcely possible to write the history of the one without borrowing a great deal from the other. The greatest part of ancient, and even modern authors, have confounded them, or described them by equivocal denominations which might be applied to both. The Greeks had no knowledge either of the elk or the rein-deer, for Aristotle makes no mention of them; and, among the Latins, Julius Cæsar is the first who has made use of the word _Alce_. Pausanias, who wrote above a hundred years after Julius Cæsar, is also the first Greek author who takes notice of this name of [Greek: Alchê]; and Pliny, who was nearly contemporary with Pausanias, has very obscurely indicated the elk and the rein-deer under the names _alce_, _machlis_, and _tarandus_. We cannot, therefore, say, that the name _alce_, is properly Greek or Latin; it seems to have been derived from the Celtic tongue, in which the elk is named _elch_ or _elk_. The Latin name of the rein-deer is still more uncertain; many naturalists have thought that this was the _machlis_ of Pliny, because this author, in speaking of the animals of the north, quotes, at the same time, the _alce_ and the _machlis_, and says that the last particularly belongs to Scandinavia, and was never seen at Rome, nor even in all the extent of the Roman empire. Nevertheless, we find in Cæsar's Commentaries a passage that we can