It seems now to be a point agreed upon by travellers and naturalists, that the famous animal, having one horn only upon his forehead, is the fanciful creation of poets and painters; to them I should willingly leave it, but a Swedish naturalist, Dr Sparman, who has lately published two volumes in quarto, in which he has distinguished himself by his low illiberal abuse of learned foreigners, as much as by the fulsome flattery he has bestowed on his own countrymen, has shewed an inclination to revive this antiquated fable. I do not, for my own part, believe the authority will be thought sufficient, or have many followers. The publisher, by way of apology, as suppose, for his rusticity and ill-manners, says, that he was employed in labour to earn a sufficient sum upon which to travel. What labour he applied to is not said; it was not a lucrative occupation surely, or the Doctor was not an able labourer, as the sum produced was but 38 dollars, and I really think his knowledge acquired seems to be pretty much in proportion to his funds. Kolbe mentions what would seem a variety of the rhinoceros at the Cape. He says it has one horn upon its nose, and another upon his forehead. This the Count de Buffon thinks is untrue, and, from other circumstances of the narrative, supposes that Kolbe never saw this rhinoceros, and has described it only from hearsay. Though this, too, is Doctor Sparman’s opinion, yet, unwilling to let slip an opportunity of contradicting the Count de Buffon, he taxes it as an improper criticism upon this rhinoceros of Kolbe: he says the description is a just one, and that a man of the Count’s learning should have known that the forehead and nose of all animals were _near_ each other. Although he has given a strange drawing of the skeleton of the head of a rhinoceros, where the nose and the forehead are very distinctly different, yet, in another drawing, he has figured his rhinoceros bicornis, with a head seemingly all nose, and much liker an ass than any thing we have seen pretended to be a rhinoceros ever since the time of Albert Durer. He pretends that, in his travels at the Cape, he saw an animal of this form, which had two horns upon his forehead, or his nose, whichever he pleases to call them. If such an animal does really exist, it is undoubtedly a new species; it has not the armour or plaited skin, seen in every rhinoceros till this time. He tells us a heap of wonderful stories about it, and claims the honour of being the first discoverer of it; and really, I believe, he is so far in the right, that if he can prove what he says to be true, there is no man that will pretend to dispute this point with him. Besides its having a skin without plaits, it has two horns on the forehead, so loose that they clash against one another, and make a noise when the animal is running: then he has one of these only that are moveable, which he turns to one side or the other when he chooses to dig roots; an