The daily morning journal and courier., 1901-06-13

A GIRAFFE WITH FIVE HORNS.
 According to brief telegram from
 Mombasa, a giraffe with five horns has
 been discovered by Sir Harry Johnson
 in recent journey through the cen
 tral and northeastern parts of the Uganda Protectorate. With all defer ence to the unicorn, we may remark that horns generally go in pairs Nor
 is the giraffe, as we know it, specially
 well provided with these appendages.
 It has, indeed, two bony prominences
 above it's eyes, which resemble horn cores or antlers, but never get chance
 of growing; indeed, they are covered
 up, with skin, and afe far from con-
 spicuous. Even a four horned giraffe
 would be strange, and we can only con-, ceive that it grew a fifth by initiating the rhinoceros. But the giraffe Is so | strange an animal, and has had such | curious ancestors, that it would be
 rash to say that anything was impos- | sible in creature which looks as if it l was made up of misfits. It seems hardly likely that this latest novelty is merely a variant of the one to which the name Helladotherium, from a ge-
 
 piled the other day Rumors about that animal have been floating about for several years.
 | Sir Henry Stanley heard of it from the natives of the Semeiki forest, who described it as large animal some- thing like horse. So Sir Harry Johnston was on the lookout, and found by inquiry that the Okapi, as it was called by the natives, was known to the Portuguese on the borders of the Congo State, and at last he obtained skin and two skulls, which are now on their way to this country. Two ban doliers, however, made of it's skin, and drawing of the animal by Sir Harry himself have already arrived and been exhibited at scientific gatherings. Both in its general form and it's mark ings the so-called Helladotherium is more like a zebra than giraffe though the fore quarters are rather higher than the hind. Sir Harry said that he had not himself seen the anil mal, and we are not aware that any written account accompanied the drawing; so the pair, very spiritedly depicted, may be composed from the rough sketches of more fortunate hunt CTS, checked by the above mentioned , skin The creature was at first SUD- posed to be a member of the same ge- | nus as the zebra and the horse, but, if | so, it must be far removed from the giraffe, for they belong to the odd-toed | division of the ungulates-the horse, as | every one knows, walking delicately on !, the tip of one toe, having practically | dispensed with the others as needless ancestral luXuries while the giraffe is one of the ven-toed ungulates or has a cloven hoof. Both horse and giraffe can trace their pedigrees very far back, so there should be no real difficulty in fixing the proper place of the Central | African creature when it comes. The Helladotherium undoubtedly is rela- tive of the giraffe, and its remains oc- cur in Greece, India and possibly Per sia, in deposits called Lower Pliocene l by geologists, possibly little older than the Coralline Graz of Suffolk. It was rather more bulky than the giraffe, but it's legs were comparatively short and stout and it's skull had no appen- dages.
 Another lost relative of the giraffe called the Sivatherium, does, however, do something to support the new five horned claimant. Both, as depicted by MT. H. N. Hutchinson in Extinct were little like elks, and lived together in India, but the Siva- which was restricted to that actutlly had two pairs of horns, the front prong like the hinder which, however, could not be she'd rudely resembling those of the elk. As some living genera, such as the rhino ,eros, horse and elephant have sur- yived from the Pliocene period, so per- 1aps may the Helladotherium, though most of its companions have vanished. If so, Central Africa on the whole, is a likely place to find it, for many of the mammals which tenanted Europe in he Pliocene and still later ages are . snown to have retreated in that direc- ion There was time-when man lad already appeared-when the spot ( ed hyena, the hippopotamus, the an- estor of the African elephant, not to ' mention animals now more widely dis $ ributed, were abundant north of the