Representing the Rhinoceros: The Royal Society between Art and Science in the Eighteenth Century


Representing the Rhinoceros: The Royal Society between
Art and Science in the Eighteenth Centuryjecs_322 545..566

C R A I G A S H L E Y H A N S O N

Abstract: Discrepancies between the empirical evidence of single-horned
rhinoceroses witnessed by Europeans and references from antiquity regarding
double-horned rhinos puzzled members of the Royal Society for decades,
particularly the circle of physicians around Drs Richard Mead and Hans
Sloane. Three articles published in the Philosophical Transactions proposing
solutions to the two-horned dilemma and the kinds of evidence on which they
depended raised crucial issues for the Royal Society during the period –
antiquarian concerns tied to philology, numismatics, textual emendation and
collecting as well as the conceptual overlap between medical theory and the
knowledge of the ancient world generally.

Keywords: Richard Mead, Hans Sloane, rhinoceros, Royal Society of London,
antiquarianism, numismatics, collecting

The title-page of A New and Perfect Book of Beasts, Flowers, Fruits, Butterflies &
Other Vermine (Fig. 1) provides a telling picture of the Restoration fascination
for the natural world. Etched in London by Wenceslaus Hollar, the print
supplies thirty different animals stretched across the foreground, with
a neatly enclosed physic garden receding into the distance.1 The mode
of delineation suggests subtle attention to detail, with an emphasis on
naturalistic credibility; the animals are choreographed to make the most of the
given space. It is, however, an impossible menagerie – both spatially (scale
and movement are hardly convincing) and relationally (one can only imagine
the feeding frenzy if movement were feasible). This tension between empi-
rical observation and the representation of nature according to received
conventions of knowledge is perhaps most apparent in the disjunction between
text and image. The fine print of the title boasts that the specimens have been
‘exactly drawne after ye life & naturall’. And yet – even beyond doubts viewers
may have regarding the veracity of particular features of the elephant or the
lion – the inclusion of a unicorn pointedly suggests a rather different project.

In terms of artistic conventions, Albrecht Dürer’s famous rhinoceros from
1515 is easily recognised just to the right of the elephant. The familiar profile is
perfectly appropriate here, given the enormous influence the image exerted for
well over two centuries – and since it, too, came with insinuations of having

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 33 No. 4 (2010)

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been drawn from life, when in fact Dürer produced the picture working from
only a sketch and a second-hand description.2

Numerous scholars have recounted the history of Dürer’s rhinoceros and
its impact on European art.3 In fact, the literature on the wider European
reception of rhinoceroses – as both symbols of curiosity and as actual animals
– is remarkably comprehensive. Kees Rookmaaker has catalogued thousands
of relevant sources, while T. H. Clarke has surveyed rhinocerotica in more
tightly conceived art-historical terms, addressing not only prints and
paintings but also the decorative arts.4 More recently, Glynis Ridley’s account
of the Leiden rhinoceros exhibited throughout Europe from 1741 to 1758 has
shown that, in addition to such ambitious surveys, the topic can effectively
sustain more focused narratives.5

In contrast to these studies, which have focused on the Indian single-horned
rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis) – precisely because all the examples seen in
early modern Europe came from the Asian subcontinent, where rhinoceroses
do possess a single horn – interest in the double-horned rhinoceros
(specifically, the black rhinoceros, Diceros bicornis), which originates in eastern
and southern Africa, has received far less historical scrutiny.6 Although the
distinction may initially seem as pedantic to twenty-first-century readers as
many of the other questions raised by the early modern virtuosi (indeed, we’ll
see that the two-horned experts were lampooned by their detractors as

1. Wenceslaus Hollar, title-page of A New and Perfect Book of Beasts, Flowers,
Fruits, Butterflies & Other Vermine, ed. Peter Stent (London, 1663). Used by
permission of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto

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narrowly short-sighted), the difference turns out to be central to the history of
the animal’s European reception. For some of the most famous ancient textual
descriptions of the rhinoceros – especially those from Martial’s account of the
games held in the Roman Colosseum – describe the rhinoceros as a two-
horned animal. From the fascination it first exerted on the Renaissance
imagination, the rhinoceros was bound up with larger goals of recovering the
culture of antiquity.7

The residual effects of these early sixteenth-century ambitions appear a
century and half later, in Hollar’s etching. Thanks to Pliny’s Natural History,
which describes the rhinoceros and the elephant as natural antagonists,
Renaissance courts were intrigued with the possibility of a fight between these
huge pachyderms.8 The German inscription above Dürer’s image describes the
rivalry outlined by Pliny, and these bellicose expectations help explain the
inclusion of what appears to be armour around the beast. These assumed
hostilities likewise account for Hollar’s placement of the two animals beside
each other. This tradition of aggression also makes sense of the bear’s location
just to the right of the rhinoceros. In a passage that would vex the virtuosi of
both the Restoration and the early Georgian era, Martial describes in his Book
of Spectacles how a rhinoceros in the Flavian amphitheatre, after initially
refusing to engage his foe, eventually became enraged and ‘picked up a heavy
bear on his double horn like a bull tossing a load of [straw] dummies to the
stars’.9 Along with the bear, the epigram thus perhaps also explains the
position of the bull in Hollar’s print, just slightly further to the right. More
importantly, the passage highlights the double horn of the rhinoceros.

How members of London’s Royal Society grappled with that question
underscores larger problems relating to the Society’s empirical programme.
Modern scholarship has often framed the tensions between ancient authority
and the evidence of the senses in Whiggish terms: observation of ‘what’s
there in nature’ supersedes received traditions, and science triumphs over
superstition. Here, however, the tables are turned. For what had yet to be
confirmed by the senses – the bi-corned rhinoceros from Africa – filled a
position as precarious as that of the unicorn. The fact that the textual
sources turned out to be correct even in the absence of visual confirmation
introduced interesting methodological challenges for early modern scholars.
Here I focus on three articles published in the Philosophical Transactions
around the middle of the eighteenth century. Given that most of the
participants were physicians, the material holds implications for the history of
medicine, and, interestingly, the medical dimensions of the rhinoceros have
largely been marginalised. The proposed solutions to the two-horned
dilemma and the kinds of evidence on which they depended raised crucial
issues for the Royal Society during the period – antiquarian concerns tied to
philology, numismatics, textual emendation and collecting as well as the
conceptual overlap between medical theory and knowledge of the ancient
world generally. Running throughout the material, the importance of social
relationships reinforces the constructed character of knowledge, even as the

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story also suggests an alternative point of emphasis from the typical
opposition between realist and social-constructionist models of science.
Ultimately, early modern understandings of the rhinoceros did change
substantially as a result of first-hand experiences with these animals,
although in ways quite distinct from the immediate terms of these mid-
eighteenth-century debates.

I.

In February 1766 Dr James Parsons (1705-1770) addressed the Royal Society
on the topic of a specimen of double horns (Fig. 2), which he had acquired
from the Cape of Good Hope through his ‘curious and worthy friend’ William
McGuire. The physician frames the paper, published later that year in
Philosophical Transactions, as a sequel to an article he had read before the
group twenty-three years earlier, in June 1743, suggesting that, at that time,

2. J. Mynde, after James Parsons, illustration from James Parsons, ‘Letter to
the President of the Royal Society on the Double Horns of the Rhinoceros’,
Philosophical Transactions 56 (1766). Used by permission of the University of

Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center

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‘few of the Society’ had ‘ever seen a pair’.10 He raises the problem of how best
to translate the lines from Martial, resuming the discussion where he had
left off two decades earlier. Now vindicated for his rejection of various
emendations, he recounts an anecdote concerning Dr Richard Mead (1673-
1754), who, along with several colleagues, had supported alternative
readings of Martial’s epigram. Parsons notes that Mead himself later received
a delivery of various items brought from Angola by ‘an African trader’ that
included ‘the bones of the face of a young Rhinoceros, with two horns, in situ,
all entire’.11 Confronted with the evidence, Mead readily acknowledged his
error. And so, as a testimony to Mead’s cooperative disposition, Parsons
describes himself in 1766 as possessed of ‘a double pleasure’: for not only does
his own double horn provide an opportunity for ‘amusing’ the Society with
‘a most curious specimen in natural history’ but it also occasions his
recollection of the ‘nice candour and generosity of Doctor Mead’.12

Parsons’s earlier contribution, the ‘Natural History of the Rhinoceros’
(1743) was written in response to the exhibition of a male rhino in London in
1739.13 It was the second rhinoceros to be brought to the city, but, as the first
had died sixty-three years earlier, this was for most Londoners their first direct
experience of the animal.14 Parsons’s friend and fellow member of the Royal
Society Dr James Douglas (c.1675-1742) had spoken on the subject before the
Society in June, just a week after the rhinoceros went on display in Eagle
Street, near the homes of both Parsons and Douglas, in Red Lion Square. As
Parsons notes, Douglas apparently intended to publish a more thorough
account, and although his collection of rhinoceros prints and drawings still
survives in Glasgow, he died before compiling the monograph. (The young
William Hunter was then living with Douglas, working as his assistant and
tutor to his son; Hunter inherited the illustrations, which are still to be found
in the Hunterian Library.15) Following Douglas’s death, Parsons himself took
up the task. He too assembled a collection of prints and made drawings, as
well as two paintings, of the Eagle Street rhinoceros.16

As though anticipating the twentieth-century commitment among
rhinoceros scholars to catalogue, Parsons begins his article by acknowledging
and assessing his numerous forerunners, from Dürer onwards, attending
especially to fidelity of appearances. He concludes that the German
Renaissance master ‘never saw the animal’. He credits Dr Jacob Bontius
(1592-1631) with improving on Dürer but faults the Dutch scholar for his
depiction of the hoofs.17 He gives mixed grades to the Huguenot traveller John
Chardin (1643-1713) and to Joachim Camerarius (1500-1574), whose book of
emblems included several depictions of rhinoceroses, including one of the
animal throwing a bear with its horn (Fig. 3) to illustrate the point that a
strong man is not easily angered but justly responds with force when
provoked.18

After assuring readers that his own report pays ‘no regard to those of other
authors’ but relies solely on first-hand observation, Parsons spends the bulk of
the article describing the animal’s appearance, how he was brought to

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England, his diet, temperament, size, the features of his head (including, of
course, his horn), his body, his legs, his penis and skin. As already noted,
Parsons concludes the article with his criticisms of efforts to emend Martial.
Specifically, he responds to the Huguenot scholar Samuel Bochart (1599-
1667), who had addressed the rhinoceros in 1663 in his treatise on the
animals of the Bible.19 For Bochart, the matter of the true nature of the
rhinoceros could be resolved by correcting what he took to be a mistake in
the transmission of the epigrams. And thus he proposed revising the
traditional passage from Martial:

Namque gravem gemino cornu sic extulit ursum
(For he picked up a heavy bear on his double horn)

so that it would, instead, read:

Namque gravi geminum cornu sic extulit urum
(For he picked up a double ox on his heavy horn).

3. Hans Sibmacher, emblem of a rhinoceros throwing a bear, in Joachim
Camerarius, Symbolorum et emblematum ex animalbius quadrupedibus
desumtorum centuria altera (Nuremberg, 1595). Used by permission of

the Wellcome Library, London

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For Bochart, the gemino (double or pair) must surely modify the animal(s)
being thrown, which he altered from bears to wild oxen; never mind the
syntactical somersaults.20 For Parsons, even in 1743, this was needless
tinkering that took inappropriate liberties with Martial and failed to admit the
possibility of multiple species of rhinoceroses. In the later ‘Natural History of
the Rhinoceros’ he proposes that, in contrast to the rhinos brought to Europe
from Asia in his own day, the ancient Romans would have been more likely to
import animals from Africa, and thus the differences in horns might be tied to
geographical variations.21 As evidence, he cites Peter Kolb, whose account of
the Cape of Good Hope provides a description of the bi-corned black
rhinoceros.22 He observes that Dr Hans Sloane’s collection included a
specimen of the two horns, and he notes that a coin from Domitian’s reign
included ‘the Figure of a Rhinoceros with Two Horns upon the Nose, very
plain’.23 Turning the emendation principle on its head, he even interprets the
dorsal horn from Dürer’s image as an attempt to preserve the integrity of
Martial’s original lines.24

It would seem that the matter could have ended here, as Parsons neatly
outlines the options: ‘several Critics who have handled this Matter, show
abundance of Ingenuity in changing Martial’s Reading; yet if we can make it
appear, that there was a Rhinoceros with Two-Horns on his Nose in Rome,
then that Poet was right; if not, Bochart has the better.’25 Indeed, he seems to
have made a convincing case for the existence of the bi-corned rhinoceros,
thanks to: (a) an eyewitness report of the living animal; (b) a specimen of two
horns in London; and (c) an image from an ancient coin. No essential new
forms of evidence would emerge between 1743 and 1766, and yet the
question persisted. According to traditional approaches within the history of
science that often focus on the advancement of knowledge, we might explain
the period in Kuhnian terms as an expected phase of resistance as this new
understanding unsettled previous beliefs.26 This lack of resolution, however,
also supplies a glimpse into the stakes of the debate as well as the social
dimensions of this process of knowledge production. The circle of colleagues
evoked by Parsons – Douglas, Mead, Maittaire and Sloane – deserve more
attention. For with them the story is no longer simply one of Europe’s
expanding intellectual grasp of the rhinoceros but instead becomes a tale of
the intellectual positioning of ancient authority and empirical data, the vital
connection between antiquarianism and the profession of learned medicine,
and, finally, the social functions that a collection could serve.

II.

In the spring of 1749 Hans Sloane (1660-1753) presented a paper before the
Royal Society on the topic of serpent stones, rhinoceros bezoars and the
specimen of double horns from his own collection, which Parsons had
included in his article of 1743 (Fig. 4).27 The stones, commonly known since
the sixteenth century as Pietra de Cobra de Cabelos, were said to come from

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just behind the eyes of particularly poisonous snakes. The bezoars – calculi
comprised of various ‘indigestible Substances’ – were believed to come from
the intestinal tracts of rhinoceroses, with the largest examples measuring
about the size of an orange. The horns, we learn, were acquired through
Charles Lockyer, who sailed for ‘the East-Indian and African Companies’.28

Initially, this trio of objects seems like a peculiar assortment, perhaps easily
dismissed as virtuosic show-and-tell, a mode of discourse for which there has
rarely been a paucity of criticism – whether from Restoration satires or Walter
Houghton’s influential series of essays from the early 1940s.29 Yet, for all that
the article of 1749 may lack in terms of unity and an explicit thesis, the three

4. J. Mynde, illustration from Hans Sloane, ‘A Letter [...] with the Figure of a
Rhinoceros with a Double Horn’, Philosophical Transactions 46 (1749). Used

by permission of the University of Chicago Library, Special Collections
Research Center

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objects are by no means unrelated for Sloane. They are all examples of natural
resources with potential health benefits. He draws on the Florentine physician
Francesco Redi (1626-1698) for the efficacy of both the serpent stones,
thought to counteract the effects of poison and fevers, and the bezoars, which
were similarly believed to draw out substances from the body: Sloane asserts
here that they facilitate delivery for pregnant women, although he warns that
‘immediately after the birth, it [the bezoar] should be removed; for if it
remains tied there [to the leg] it brings away the Womb, &c. and the Woman
dies.’30

In light of the experimental emphasis of the early Royal Society, the claims
are striking. For all the comic derision they may now inspire, Sloane is
attentive to evidence, even if most of his sources are second- or third-hand. He
notes, for instance, that the former President of the Royal College of
Physicians, John Bateman, had reported observing the snake stone’s ‘great
Effects (upon the Bite of a Viper)’ before Charles II, ‘a great lover of such
Natural Experiments’. On the testimony of Dr Alexander Stuart’s encounter
with a missionary in the East Indies, Sloane doubts that the snake stones
originated from the heads of serpents but instead believes them to be
composed of buffalo bones. His use of Redi is especially interesting, given that
the Italian doctor sided firmly against claims regarding the efficacy of the
stones in a well-known controversy with the Jesuit polymath Athanasius
Kircher, from the 1660s and ’70s. As Martha Baldwin has demonstrated,
Kircher – like Sloane – was perfectly willing to accept the field reports of
others (especially fellow Jesuits scattered throughout Asia), whereas Redi
privileged his own experiments.31 Redi includes accounts of those who affirm
the stones’ potency in countering poisonous bites of one sort or another but
ultimately rejects them as unreliable. Sloane, however, feels perfectly justified
in extracting those accounts as independent pieces of evidence, quite apart
from Redi’s conclusions.

Throughout his career Sloane adhered to established therapeutic lore,
including not only serpent stones and bezoars but also various parts of the
rhinoceros. The catalogue from his collection, for instance, includes the
following annotations:

Shavings of a rhinoceros horn for a counter poison.
Rhinoceros’s hyde [...] the Blood is used to fortify the heart & in all Contagious
diseases causing the Sweat very plentifully Stops the flux of the Belly and
purifies the Blood & stops Bleding. Of the Horn are made Cups against the bad
air in time of Contagion. The teeth are used for the tooth ache applying it
against the aching tooth.32

The bezoars still survive in Sloane’s pharmaceutical collection, which was
organised among numerous wooden trays with tidy compartments. In
comparison with mummia, a bituminous substance from Egyptian mummies,
prized among many learned physicians for its usefulness in treating a range of
illnesses, the bezoars hardly seem extraordinary.33

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Broadly speaking, there is a discernible shift from the sixteenth-century
emblematic understanding of the rhinoceros, exemplified by Camerarius, to a
seventeenth-century enthusiasm for searching out actual specimens, often
with a literal conception of the potential benefits the rhinoceros might hold.
To be sure, these expectations were fuelled, in part, by the same sources, but
the age of exploration opened up possibilities for first-hand encounters with
these animals that altered the scope of Europeans’ fascination with the
rhinoceros well beyond the humanists’ curiosity in the decades following
1515, notwithstanding the tremendous presence evoked by Dürer’s
representation.

It’s telling that Dr Bontius, writing in the early seventeenth century,
presents his account of the rhinoceros as correcting the remarks of the
Portuguese physician Garcias de Orta: ‘the author confesses that he never had
seen the rhinoceros, but I have not only seen him a hundred times in his den,
but also wandering through the woods.’ To be sure, Bontius goes on to repeat
unfounded elements of traditional lore, including the claim that the animal is
known to lick people to death with its rough tongue, which then ‘lays bare the
bones’, and he generally emphasises the rhino’s purported ‘ferocity’.34 But in
this account of the natural history and medicines of the East Indies, Bontius
takes it for granted that reliable first-hand field reports are crucial and that the
rhinoceros belongs in such a text.

The same sensibility appears in the first decades of the Royal Society’s
history. Thomas Sprat, for instance, includes in his account of the learned
group a series of questions and answers exchanged in the summer of 1664
between Robert Moray and Philberto Vernatti. After responding to such
enquiries as whether diamonds ‘grow again after three or four years in the
same places where they have been digged out’ (no), the Batavian diplomat
questions

whether the animal called Abados, or Rhincoeros, hath teeth, claws, flesh,
blood, and skin, yea his very dung and water, as well as his horns, Antidotal;
and whether the horns of those beasts be better or worse, according to the food
they live upon.35

Vernatti affirms the therapeutic qualities of these parts of the rhino,
describing them as ‘esteemed Antidotes’ with ‘the same use in the Indian
Pharmacopiea as the Therieca hath in ours’, and judges that diet makes little
difference (‘the food I believe is all one to this Animal’).36

By the mid-1680s the collection of the Royal Society contained the skin of
a young rhinoceros, a larger rhinoceros skin that had been tanned, a rhino
tail and four horns. In Dr Nehemiah Grew’s catalogue we read again that ‘the
Rhinoceros horn, in India, as also his teeth, claws, flesh, skin, blood, yea dung
and piss are much esteemed and used against poison.’37 In many ways
London’s medical community was well primed to accept the therapeutic value
of the rhinoceros. In 1617, working from the emblematic tradition of the
Renaissance, the antiquary William Camden included a rhinoceros (indebted,

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predictably, to Dürer) at the top of his design for the heraldic arms of the
newly independent Society of Apothecaries (Fig. 5). Along with Apollo, the
god of healing, and two supporting unicorns, the shield includes the motto
‘Opiferque per orbem dicor’ (‘I am called all over the world the Bringer of
Aid’). The imagery stakes out a middle ground between the arms of the
Barber–Surgeons, which emphasises intervention, and that of the Society of
Physicians, which stresses studious attention and observation.38 Members of
the Society of Apothecaries are instead shown as practitioners of an art
founded on action, equipped not merely with mechanical skills but with an
arsenal of effective weapons.

Notwithstanding the widely held belief that the rhinoceros was employed
medicinally as an aphrodisiac, it was, in fact, nearly always characterised
as an antidote for poison or prescribed for illnesses associated with
contamination (in China and Korea rhinoceros horns are still used illegally to
treat fevers).39 In Europe the connection between the rhino and poison
remedies resulted from the conflation of the rhinoceros and the mythical
unicorn, as seen in the arms of the Apothecaries.40 Despite the occasional
expression of scepticism from Greek and Latin sources, the unicorn came to

5. Arms of the Society of Apothecaries, originally designed by William
Camden in 1617. Used by permission of the Wellcome Library, London

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thrive in the European imagination, thanks especially to the medieval fable
tradition, which depended heavily on the late antique text the Physiologus. By
the twelfth century tusks from narwhal whales were being sold as unicorn
horns, and four centuries later such specimens were still highly prized: Queen
Elizabeth owned at least two. The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,
however, mark an important shift. In the 1560s the Council of Trent worked
to distance the iconography of Christ and the Virgin Mary from the unicorn,
and the great mapmaker Gerhardus Mercator identified the whale as the
source of the horn in his atlas of 1621. Yet if faith in the unicorn waned in the
early modern period, its purported medical associations continued to be
attached to the rhinoceros – that other one-horned beast, which clearly did
exist. The ambitious and prolific quack practitioner William Salmon noted in
his Pharmacopoeia Londinensis; or, The New London Dispensatory that the
rhino’s horn ‘is good against Poyson, Plague, and all Pestilential Diseases [...]
It is often used instead of Unicorns Horn, and for all that I know to the
contrary with as much success.’ With bets hedged this well, it was a difficult
argument to refute.41

At the same time we might understand the Royal Society’s eighteenth-
century discussions of the bi-corned rhinoceros as a mark of progress.
Physicians working in the circle of Parsons and Sloane were increasingly able
to dissociate the rhinoceros from the folklore of the unicorn, turning their
antiquarian attentions to reconciling ancient sources with the evidence of
nature. Camden’s early seventeenth-century antiquarianism, which still
relied so heavily on emblems, gave way a century and a half later to more
literal antiquarian instincts. Sloane, as has been seen, continued to accept the
traditional medical benefits of the rhino, but by the time he presented his
serpent stone, the rhino bezoars and the double horns in 1749, he was nearly
ninety years old.42 His article marks the twilight of this tradition as much as
underscoring its longevity. Yet, even for those physicians who no longer
accepted the medicinal efficacy of the rhinoceros, their interest in the animal
should not be divorced from their medical ambitions.

Questions raised over the two-horned rhinoceros might have been laid to
rest much earlier. In 1677 an African rhinoceros from the Cape was shipped to
Europe but died during the voyage. The skin and double horns, however, were
preserved and exhibited at the University of Leiden. One of the medical
students who must have seen the specimen there was Richard Mead, who
studied in Leiden from 1693 to 1695.43 Assuming that Mead did observe the
horns, one is placed in the awkward position of explaining why he would have
then doubted the existence of the bi-corned animal decades later, as Parsons
reports in his Transactions article of 1766. Actually, a number of conditions
complicate Parsons’s report, although several points should be borne in mind
alongside these challenges.

Michael Maittaire, whom Parsons also cites as doubting the reliability of
the traditional reading of Martial, in fact dedicated his 1716 edition of the
Liber spectaculorum to Mead. Maittaire’s edition of the epigrams maintains the

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standard rendering of the two-horned rhinoceros, thus posing additional
problems for Parsons’s later claims. The emendations were presumably
offered in another context, but in this public forum of a printed edition the
original still stands.

Nonetheless, the example provided by another book dedicated to Mead
supports the general case for Mead’s interest in emendation. In 1720 Dr
Charles Peters (1695-1746?) dedicated his edition of Hieronymus
Frascatorius’s poem Syphillis, sive morbus Gallicus (1530) to his patron and
mentor. The first edition on which Peters relied came from Mead’s library, so
the decision hardly comes as a surprise. Interestingly, however, Peters spends
little time in his preface on pathological questions but instead suggests three
emendations intended to improve the text’s literary value. For all of the
apparent insignificance of the changes, such attention to linguistic refine-
ment is consistent with Mead’s attempt to distinguish his profession of learned
medicine from non-degreed practitioners such as Salmon. While embracing
the experimental commitments of the Royal Society, Mead looked to
mathematics and Classical languages to separate himself from the quacks and
the empirics, those persuasive marketers who would treat symptoms on the
basis of whatever seemed to work rather than medical theory. (For Samuel
Johnson, the word ‘empirical’ still connoted quackery, even in the 1750s.) In
his Mechanical Account of Poisons Mead argued that any physician lacking
mathematical proficiency would surely be ‘as ridiculous as one without Greek
or Latin’.44 And for all the emphasis Mead placed on mathematics, he simply
could not imagine the field of physick (literally the study of nature) without
the Classical languages. Going one step further, I would suggest that Mead
probably accepted a correlation between a doctor’s linguistic and medical
skills. And thus Peters’s edition of Frascatorius – or a debate over how a line
from Martial should be translated – was hardly a simple diversion. It was,
instead, an important means of establishing one’s credentials as a learned
physician. The debates over the horns of the rhinoceros were bound up with
empirical issues, but for physicians who belonged to the Royal Society (men
who struggled to embrace the New Science and yet not be seen as empirics),
the ancients still mattered.

With the importance of textual expertise in mind, we can return to the
question of Mead’s apparent reluctance to trust the unemended Martial as
reliable. A number of peculiarities, in addition to those already noted, mark
Parsons’s ‘Letter’ of 1766. Sloane, for instance, had explained even in 1749
that Mead also had come to possess a specimen of double horns. Even
stranger, Dr Douglas, another proponent of emendation, according to
Parsons, had travelled in the mid-1730s to Leiden, where he too saw the
medical school’s bi-corned specimen. (Drawings that he made survive in
Glasgow.) He also met with Jan Wandelaar, who had supplied the first
reasonably accurate depiction of an African rhinoceros for Kolb’s text the
previous decade. Even giving Parsons the benefit of the doubt, it is difficult not
to see his contribution in 1766 to the Transactions as opportunistic self-

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promotion. By his own admission, the case had been settled in Mead’s mind
since the 1740s (if not earlier), when the older physician acquired his pair of
horns. Parsons weighing in to publish his own recent acquisition hardly sheds
new light on the problem.

One ‘H. D.’, writing in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1768, reached a similar
conclusion. He observes that ‘for a Rhinoceros to toss up two bulls or bears at
once would be much more extraordinary than that he should have two horns’
and that one need only consult Pausanius to see that rhinoceroses with
double horns were hardly uncommon. In short, Parsons had created a
problem where none should have ever existed and succeeded in proving that
which should have been obvious all along. That Parsons responded simply by
reiterating his argument – as though he were guilty not of proving the
obvious but of failing to make his case – indicates that he hardly understood
the criticism.

On the one hand, such contemporary challenges offer interpretive re-
assurance; that something which may now appear puzzling could have been
equally baffling in the period helps establish some measure of hermeneutic
continuity. On the other hand, H. D.’s critique can itself be seen to underscore
a methodological gap between the Royal Society and its detractors. For H.D.
built his case not on the previous specimens but on logical inference and
textual support, those very forms of evidence that the empirical orientation of
the New Science worked to complicate. In addition, Parsons’s contribution
to the Transactions underscores several central themes more generally for
the history of the virtuosi and the Royal Society. First, we should not
underestimate the importance of collecting for these physicians. Sloane, for
instance, owned the original drawing of the Dürer rhinoceros, which is still
today in the British Museum. In his article from 1749 he also raised the
problem of how to interpret Martial’s epigram, in part because it afforded him
the opportunity to publish the coin from his collection that had been issued
under the reign of Domitian, the one that Parsons cited in 1743 without an
illustration.45 And thus the publication of 1766 allowed Parsons, in a sense, to
join the ranks of Sloane and Mead, both of whom had by this point been dead
for over a decade. Indeed, part of the earlier debate had hinged on the fact that
Sloane’s specimen had become twisted as the skin dried, and so the horns
were crossed in a way that they clearly would not have been while the animal
was alive (itself an interesting dilemma for empirical approaches to evidence).
The state of Mead’s specimen is unclear, but part of Parsons’s pleasure seems
to stem from the condition of his horns.

Second, the culture of the Royal Society tended to foster serial approaches
to knowledge. Articles were not expected to settle problems on their own but
were understood to have a cumulative effect. Indeed, Dr Grew singled out the
dilemma of reconciling Martial and the evidence of the senses as early as
1685; faced with the line from Epigram 26 on one side and the eyewitness
reports of men such as Bontius on the other, he frankly confessed, ‘I do not
well understand.’46 From the beginning, the Royal Society tended to sketch

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out research project and goals for the future; for all the plans never seriously
undertaken, others were taken up. Parsons was, in a sense, maintaining a
collective, institutional memory. It is the extraordinary duration of time –
nearly eighty years – that makes this case so remarkable.

Third, there was, in a related vein, a central role for social relationships
within the Royal Society. Ties were formed through scholarly contributions,
shared interests, book dedications and the exchange of favours and gifts. For
all of the benefits Parsons may have gleaned from associating himself more
closely with Mead, his recollections also served to perpetuate the memory of
Mead within the Society – just as a book dedication could continue to forge
social bonds decades after it appeared. The point is underscored by the fact
that Mead’s collection of paintings – one of the most impressive non-
aristocratic collections in England – included a picture of the Eagle Street
rhinoceros painted by Parsons around 1740 (Fig. 6).47 Mead certainly
possessed works that could, on aesthetic grounds, rival the finest collections
in Europe, but there were other factors at play too. Pictures could secure social
bonds and contribute to a general understanding of the natural world, in
addition to providing artistic pleasure.

III.

Here I’m especially sympathetic to Charlotte Klonk’s concern that too often
the coupling of art and science has resulted in situations where ‘the scientific

6. James Parsons, Rhinoceros, oil on canvas, c.1740. Used by permission of
the Natural History Museum, London

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quest for truth is seen to determine changes in art’.48 It’s heartening to see the
work of scholars such as Wolfgang Klein and Pamela Smith, both of whom
have argued for the central role of artistic production in the development of
scientific conventions, including conventions associated with what counts as
real in the first place.49 Methodologically, the case of the reception of the
bi-corned rhinoceros could be told from various vantage points within the
history of science. There are plenty instances of ‘facts’ for the realists and
social practices for the constructionists. Yet perhaps most fascinating is that
Parsons genuinely cared about translating Martial correctly. It may not have
been his primary objective, and he did help push the scientific community
towards a widespread acceptance of there being distinct species of
rhinoceroses in India and Africa. (While Buffon remained sceptical, Petrus
Camper made the case in a definitive manner in 1780.50) But for Parsons the
question should hardly be bracketed out from the task of securing the best
possible rendering of a first-century poet. In terms of our own modernist
disciplinary labels, there was no reason Zoology and Taxonomy shouldn’t
serve the Classics. And he took it for granted that a learned physician was
perfectly placed to tackle both sorts of questions.

In the end, the first-hand experience of the rhinoceros did transform
European attitudes toward the animal, although ultimately the alterations
were much more profound than whether there were one or two horns. As

7. Philippe Halsman, Salvador Dalí and a Rhinoceros, 1956.
Copyright Philippe Halsman/Magnum Photos. Used by permission of

Magnum Photos

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Glynis Ridley demonstrates in her study of Clara, a growing familiarity
gradually wore away the image of the rhinoceros as threatening, quick and
fierce. Instead, Europeans were amazed simply at the animal’s size and its vast
vegetarian food requirements. The rhino became a domesticated marvel
rather than a vicious point of entry into the distant past of ancient Rome;
even the purported rough tongue was eventually relinquished in the face of
the immediate evidence. The transformation is perhaps best seen in Thomas
Davies’s characterisation of Samuel Johnson: ‘he laughs like a rhinoceros.’51

The simile may evoke gravitas (of body and personality) or a stormy
disposition, even in the face of comic delight (laughter as growl), but it hardly
conjures images of gladiatorial combat. The physiognomic potential that
Thomas Rowlandson would find in the rhinoceros’s profile at the turn of the
century underscores the transformation.52 And from here we are only a short
distance from the tête-à-tête staged in 1960 between a two-horned rhinoceros
and Salvador Dalí (Fig. 7).53 Confronting the rhinoceros has in some ways
always been much more about us – our fears and desires – than the two-ton
animal we think we see.

NOTES
Earlier versions of this paper were presented in London in 2006 in conjunction with the
conference ‘Beyond Mimesis and Nominalism’, and in Fargo in 2009 as a plenary address for the
Midwest American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference. I’m indebted to Matt
Hunter, Jeane Haggeman, Ray Stephanson and Anna Arnar for their constructive comments.
Thanks also to Calvin College for assisting with the cost of the images.

1. Peter Stent (ed.), Animalium, ferarum, & bestiarum, florum, fructuum, muscarum, vermiumq
[...] A New and Perfect Book of Beasts, Flowers Fruits, Butterflies & Other Vermine (London, 1663);
the book of plates was expanded and reissued in 1674. The first state of the etching, the one
shown here, is dated to correspond with the first edition; in the third state the year was changed
to match the revised version. See Richard Pennington, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Etched Work
of Wenceslaus Hollar, 1607-1677 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p.325, no. 2064.

2. For a drawing of 1515 discovered in the Vatican Library by Ingrid Rowland that may have
provided Dürer’s inspiration, see Jim Monson, ‘The Source for the Rhinoceros’, Print Quarterly 21
(2004), p.50-53. For issues of an emerging empiricism in Dürer’s humanist Nuremberg, see
Stephanie Leitch, ‘Burgkmair’s Peoples of Africa and India (1508) and the Origins of Ethnography
in Print’, Art Bulletin 91 (June 2009), p.134-59. Dürer’s use of the German abkunterfet
(‘portrayal’ or ‘representation’) often connoted ‘copied from life’. See Peter Parshall, ‘Imago
Contrafacta: Images and Facts in the Northern Renaissance’, Art History 16 (1993), p.554-79.
Going back at least to Villard de Honnecourt, there were strong medieval precedents for claims
of working from life; see Erwin Panofsky, ‘Artist, Scientist, Genius: Notes on the Renaissance-
Dämerung’, The Renaissance: A Symposium. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 1952),
p.77-93; repr. in The Renaissance: Six Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p.121-2. For
Dürer’s rhinoceros as a point of entry into issues of nature and economic exchange, see Pamela
Smith and Paula Findlen, ‘Commerce and the Representation of Nature in Art and Science’, in
Smith and Findlen (eds), Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern
Europe (New York: Routledge, 2002), p.1-25.

3. F. J. Cole, ‘The History of Albrecht Dürer’s Rhinoceros in Zoological Literature’, in A. E.
Underwood (ed.), Science, Medicine, and History (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), p.337-
56; Donald Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 2, A Century of Wonder, Book 1, The Visual Arts
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p.158-72; John Rowlands, The Age of Dürer and
Holbein: German Drawings, 1400-1550 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p.92-4;
Colin Eisler, Dürer’s Animals (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), p.269-74;
and Giulia Bartrum, Albrecht Dürer and His Legacy: The Graphic Work of a Renaissance Artist

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(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), p.283-92. The gift of the animal serves as a
framing device for Lawrence Norfolk’s historical novel The Pope’s Rhinoceros (New York:
Harmony Books, 1996).

4. L. C. Rookmaaker, Bibliography of the Rhinoceros: An Analysis of the Literature on the Recent
Rhinoceroses in Culture, History, and Biology (Rotterdam: A. A. Balkema, 1983); L. C.
Rookmaaker, The Rhinoceros in Captivity: A List of 2439 Rhinoceroses Kept from Roman Times to
1994 (The Hague: SPB, 1998); T. H. Clarke, ‘The Iconography of the Rhinoceros: From Dürer to
Stubbs’, Connoisseur 184:739 (1973), p.2-13; T. H. Clarke, ‘The Iconography of the Rhinoceros:
The Leyden Rhinoceros’, Connoisseur 185:744 (1974), p.113-22; T. H. Clarke, The Rhinoceros from
Dürer to Stubbs, 1515-1799 (London: Sotheby’s Publications, 1986); and T. H. Clarke, ‘I Am the
Horn of a Rhinoceros’, Apollo 125 (May 1987), p.344-49. The online Rhino Resource Center,
www.rhinoresourcecenter.com, has brought this impressive standard of thoroughness into the
digital realm; Kees Rookmaaker serves as the director and chair of the site’s executive team.

5. Glynis Ridley, Clara’s Grand Tour: Travels with a Rhinoceros in Eighteenth-Century Europe
(New York: Atlantic Monthly, 2004).

6. To be fair, Kees Rookmaaker addressed the black rhinoceros in one of his earliest essays
and recently returned to the subject with his usual degree of thoroughness. For the latter, see
L. C. Rookmaaker, ‘Review of the European Perception of the African Rhinoceros’, Journal of
Zoology 265 (April 2005), p.365-76. For the former, see ‘An Early Engraving of the Black
Rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis (L.)) Made by Jan Wandelaar’, Biological Journal of the Linnean
Society 8 (March 1976), p.87-90. As Rookmaaker notes (p.87), Linnaeus supplied the binomial
for the two-horned rhinoceros in 1758, although – still unclear about the animal’s geographical
origins – he placed it in India. There are presently five rhinoceros species in the world: three from
India (two of which, the Javan and Sumatran rhinos, are reclusive forest dwellers) and two from
Africa (the white and black rhinos, both of which have double horns). Between 1515 and 1800
eight rhinoceroses were exhibited in Europe; all were Indian rhinos.

7. Vasco da Gama’s voyage from Portugal to India in the late 1490s opened up such
possibilities – along with a lucrative new trade route for spices. The ruler of Cambaia, or Gujarat,
Sultan Muzafar II, presented the rhinoceros as a diplomatic gift to the Portuguese governor, who
forwarded it to his king, Manuel I, who in turn tried sending it to the Medici pope in Rome. For
the gift in the humanist context of the Roman Curia, see Ingrid Rowland, The Culture of the High
Renaissance: Ancient and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), esp. p.211-17.

8. As early as 130 bc, Agatharcides presented the rhinoceros and elephants as natural foes.
See William Gowers, ‘The Classical Rhinoceros’, Antiquity 24 (1950), p.61-71, esp. p.66. As
Clarke notes, in The Rhinoceros (p.155), the outcome was hardly a foregone conclusion even for
ancient writers; Diodurus Siculus, for instance, assigned reasonable odds to the elephant. For
Pliny’s text in the Renaissance, see Charles Nauert, ‘Humanists, Scientists, and Pliny: Changing
Approaches to a Classical Author’, American Historical Review 84 (February 1979), p.72-85; and
Brian Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2006).

9. Epigram 26. The translation comes from the new edition by Kathleen Coleman, M. Valerii
Martialis Liber Spectaculorum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p.186. Coleman’s notes
are especially helpful; see also epigram 11, p.101-11.

10. James Parsons, ‘Letter to the President of the Royal Society on the Double Horns of the
Rhinoceros’, Philosophical Transactions 56 (1766), p.32-4. For the earlier article, see James
Parsons, ‘A Letter to Martin Folkes, Esq. President of the Royal Society, Containing the Natural
History of the Rhinoceros’, Philosophical Transactions 42 (1743), p.523-41. The ‘Natural History’
was translated into French and German; see Clarke, The Rhinoceros, p.174, n.21.

11. Parsons, ‘Letter to the President of the Royal Society’, p.34. The connections between the
slave trade and the collecting of natural history specimens certainly deserve much more scrutiny.

12. Parsons, ‘Letter to the President of the Royal Society’, p.33.
13. Clarke, The Rhinoceros, p.41-6. The Eagle Street rhinoceros also occasioned the

anonymous – and apparently rare – pamphlet A Natural History of Four-Footed Animals: Of the
Rhinoceros (London, 1739), which includes a plate by John Carwitham, who may also have been
the text’s author. The only copies I’m aware of are to be found in the collections of materials
assembled by Douglas and Parsons that now belong to the University of Glasgow Library.

14. Clarke, The Rhinoceros, p.37-41. The first rhinoceros arrived in the summer of 1684 and
died in September 1686. John Evelyn records seeing it on 22 October 1684 with William

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Godolphin; see The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. D. de Beer, 6 vols (London: Oxford University Press,
1955), vol. IV.389-90.

15. At the University of Glasgow; for a summary of the contents, see L. C. Rookmaaker, ‘Two
Collections of Rhinoceros Plates Compiled by James Douglas and James Parsons in the
Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History 9 (1978),
p.17-38.

16. The Parsons collection is also at Glasgow, although its early provenance is unclear; L. C.
Rookmaaker, ‘Two Collections of Rhinoceros Plates’, p.18

17. Jakob de Bondt, Historiae naturalis ed medicae indiae orientalis libri sex, ed. Willem Piso
(Amsterdam, 1658).

18. John Chardin, Voyage en Perse, et autres lieux de l’Orient (Amsterdam, 1711); and Joachim
Camerarius, Symbolorum et emblematum ex animalbius quadrupedibus desumtorum centuria altera
(Nuremberg, 1595), p.116. The engraving is by Hans Sibmacher. Both Douglas and Parsons
owned copies of it; see Rookmaaker, ‘Two Collections of Rhinoceros Plates’, p.22. For the image
within the context of Renaissance attitudes towards animals generally, see Claudio Lazzaro,
‘Animals as Cultural Signs: A Medici Menagerie in the Grotto at Castello’, Reframing the
Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450-1650, ed. Claire Farago (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1995), p.197-227. See also William Ashworth, ‘Natural History and
the Emblematic Worldview’, in David Lindberg and Robert Westman (eds), Reappraisals of the
Scientific Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p.303-32; and William
Ashworth, ‘Emblematic Natural History of the Renaissance’, in Nicholas Jardine, James Secord
and Emma Spary (eds), Cultures of Natural History (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1996), p.17-37.

19. Samuel Bochart, Hierozoicon sive bipertitum opus de animalibus sacrae scriptura (London,
1663), Book 3, p.931.

20. Bochart, Book 3, p.932. For the substitution of ursum (‘bear’, accusative form) for urum
(‘wild ox’, accusative form), Bochart refers to Petrus Schriverius, Johan van der Does and
Gerhard Vossius. An ancestor of domestic cattle, the urus is generally understood as the
equivalent of the re’em, encountered in the Hebrew Bible. With the urus extinct in southern
Europe by the time the Septuagint was written, the Greek translators employed monokeros
(‘single-horned creature’), which was then translated in the Latin Vulgate as unicornis. Hence
the translation in the King James Version of 1611, ‘God brought them out of Egypt; he hath as
it were the strength of a unicorn’ (Numbers 23:22). See Adolfo Cavallo, The Unicorn Tapestries at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), p.21. See also Ridley, Clara’s
Grand Tour, p.35-9. None of this, of course, explains necessarily why Bochart emends Martial so
that these oft confused animals fight each other. In 1743 Parsons cites Bochart’s text as urum; in
the 1766 article he adds the initial e, not found in Bochart (eurem). My thanks to Sean Christy for
his good-humoured help with this section.

21. Today many scholars believe that the Romans indeed sourced their rhinoceroses from
Africa, north of the Sahara, where a population of northern white rhinos (Ceratotherium simum
cottoni) perhaps lived, cut off by the encroachments of the desert across millennia. The ancients
apparently hunted the region’s animals to extinction. The species survived longer in central and
eastern Africa but appears now to have been completely vanquished in these areas as well.

22. Kolb’s text, Caput bonae spei hodiernum (Nuremberg, 1719), was published in Dutch as
Naaukeurige en uitvoerige beschrijving van de Kaap de Goede Hoope (Amsterdam, 1727). As
Rookmaaker notes in ‘An Early Engraving of the Black Rhinoceros’ (p.88), Kolb stressed the
animal’s double horn, although the first edition still included an image based on Dürer’s. The
Dutch edition, however, made use of an engraving by Jan Wandelaar portraying the rhinoceros
as bi-corned, one of the earliest instances in Europe.

23. Parsons, ‘A Letter to Martin Folkes, Esq.’, p.539. These coins, which date to ad 83-85,
continue to be valuable for scholars. On the basis of such numismatic evidence, T. V. Buttrey, for
instance, argues in ‘Domitian, the Rhinoceros, and the Date of Martial’s Liber De Spectaculis’,
Journal of Roman Studies 97 (2007), p.101-12, that Martial’s text should be dated not (as it nearly
universally is) to the reign of Titus but to that of Domitian.

24. In fact, the anonymous drawing from 1515 that Jim Monson proposes as a source for
Dürer’s image includes the annotation ‘Sunt qui dicant abite duo cornua’ (‘There are those who
say that it has two horns’), p.52. From the beginning, the question of one or two horns was a
problem in Europe.

25. Parsons, ‘A Letter to Martin Folkes, Esq., p.537.

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26. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1962). Admittedly, appreciation of the bi-corned rhinoceros hardly qualifies as a
paradigm shift, and, as originally formulated, Kuhn’s work offers key resistance to Whiggish
forms of history (even when other scholars employing his terms may not have); see Steve Fuller,
Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
2000), esp. p.22-37. Kuhn’s emphasis on the historically contingent character of scientific
standards has been received quite differently among philosophers of science, on the one hand,
and historians of science working within sociology of knowledge frameworks, on the other. For
the persistence of Kuhn’s relevance beyond the latter, see Hanne Andersen, Peter Barker, and
Xiang Chen, The Cognitive Structure of Scientific Revolutions (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2006).

27. Hans Sloane, ‘A Letter from Sir Hans Sloane Baronet, Late President of the Royal Society,
to Martin Folkes, President of the Royal Society, Containing Accounts of the Pretended Serpent
Stone Called Pietra de Cobra de Cabelos, and of the Pietra de Mombazza or the Rhinoceros
Bezoar, Together with the Figure of a Rhinoceros with a Double Horn’, Philosophical Transactions
46 (1749), p.118-25. Sloane read the paper before the Royal Society on 20 April.

28. Sloane, ‘A Letter from Sir Hans Sloane Baronet’, p.119, 120.
29. Walter Houghton, ‘The History of Trades: Its Relation to Seventeenth-Century Thought

as Seen in Bacon, Petty, Evelyn, and Boyle’, Journal of the History of Ideas 2 (1941), p.33-60; and
Walter Houghton, ‘The English Virtuoso in the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of the History of
Ideas 3 (1942), p.51-73, 190-219. For my attempt to resuscitate the intellectual credibility of the
virtuoso, see Craig Ashley Hanson, The English Virtuoso: Art, Medicine, and Antiquarianism in the
Age of Empiricism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

30. Sloane, ‘A Letter from Sir Hans Sloane Baronet’, p.120.
31. Martha Baldwin, ‘The Snakestone Experiments: An Early Modern Medical Debate’, Isis 86

(1995), p.394-418. Baldwin uses the controversy to explore how difficult finding consensus from
experiments could be, even in cases that depended on relatively straightforward trials,
particularly as professional and religious loyalties came into play. She notes (p.417) that Redi
was never able to convince many of his colleagues. In England, Robert Boyle continued to
believe in the power of the stones, as did Dr Edward Tyson.

32. Juliet Clutton-Brock, ‘Vertebrate Collections’, in Arthur MacGregor (ed.), Sir Hans Sloane:
Collector, Scientist, Antiquary, Founding Father of the British Museum (London: British Museum
Press, 1994), p.77-92, esp. p.88. The entries come from catalogue 25, ‘Fishes, Birds,
Quadrupeds’, MSS, SLO, now in the Natural History Museum, London.

33. John Thackray, ‘Mineral and Fossil Collections’, in MacGregor (ed.), Sir Hans Sloane,
p.123-35; and, in the same collection, Arthur MacGregor, ‘Egyptian Antiquities’, p.174-9, esp.
p.179, n.36.

34. Willem Piso’s 1658 edition of Bontius, noted above, was translated into English as An
Account of the Diseases, Natural History, and Medicines of the East Indies (London, 1769); see
p.182-4.

35. Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society, 2nd edn (London, 1702), p.158-9.
36. Sprat, History of the Royal Society, p.159. Theriac was a common medicine in seventeenth-

century Europe, particularly in cases involving poison; vipers were a chief ingredient. See
Baldwin, ‘The Snakestone Experiments’, p.400.

37. Nehemiah Grew, Museaum Regalis Societatis; or, A Catalogue and Description of the Natural
and Artificial Rarities Belonging to the Royal Society and Preserved at Gresham College (London,
1685), p.29-31.

38. Vincent Dickinson, ‘The Armorial Bearings of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries’,
Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 23 (November 1929), p.11-14.

39. Along with habitat decimation (especially in India), the Asian market is one of the most
serious threats facing the survival of rhinos. Poachers respond to the high demand for horns,
which are not only used as medicines but also carved into highly prized ornamental objects. See
Hermanta Mishra, The Soul of the Rhino: A Nepali Adventure with Kings and Elephant Drivers,
Billionaires and Bureaucrats, Shamans and Scientists and the Indian Rhinoceros (Guilford, CT: The
Lyons Press, 2008).

40. For the history of the unicorn I depend on Cavallo, The Unicorn Tapestries at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, p.19-27.

41. William Salmon, Pharmacopoeia Londinensis; or, The New London Dispensatory, 6th edn
(London, 1702), p.217; the first edition appeared in 1678.

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42. The more progressive (and thirteen years younger) Dr Richard Mead, for instance,
addresses serpent stones in his Mechanical Account of Poisons (London, 1702), but with much less
enthusiasm. While also drawing on experiential evidence, he looks to an explanation based not
on the exceptional quality of the stones but on their ordinary materiality: ‘by Reason of their
spongy and porous Texture, they do very readily adhere to any moistned Part of the Flesh, and
imbibe whatsoever Humidity they meet with [...] Their being thus, some Part at least of the
Poisonous Juice may easily be drawn out of the Wound by such an Application, and yet so much
of it may sometimes happen to remain in the Flesh as may make the Bite however to prove Mortal’
(p.28).

43. Gerrad Blancken, A Catalogue of All Chiefest Rarities in the Publick Theater and Anatomie Hall
of the University of Leyden (Leiden, 1701), p.3, 7, 8. Rookmaaker, ‘Review of the European
Perception of the African Rhinoceros’, p.367. In 1695 Mead travelled to Italy and perhaps saw
two more rhinoceros horns, housed in the Tribuna Gallery of the Uffizi (presumably from two
separate animals, however); that the horns were displayed alongside the paintings of Raphael,
Giorgione, Titian and Holbein underscores the significance of the discourse of curiosity for the
period. See William Bromley, Several Years Travels [...] Performed by a Gentleman (London, 1702),
p.108. For a synopsis of Mead’s life, see Hanson, The English Virtuoso, esp. p.157ff.

44. Richard Mead, Mechanical Account of Poisons, unpaginated preface. For the wider
association of ‘empiricism’ with quackery, see Hanson, The English Virtuoso, p.8-11.

45. Evidence of Sloane’s rivalry with Pembroke as a collector also appears in his account of
the provenance of the rhinoceros bezoars, p.119-20. Sloane explains that Dr Waldo also offered
them to the earl, but since Pembroke was not interested, he himself was able to acquire them all
– the implication being that Pembroke couldn’t appreciate their importance. The fact that the
collection was also offered to the painter Sir Godfrey Kneller underscores the degree to which
virtuosic networks could accommodate medical men and artists alike.

46. Grew, Museaum Regalis Societatis, p.30; after the line from Martial, the passage continues:
‘The Figure given by Piso, as above, represents but one Horn only. Neither doth Bontius (who
saith he hath seen great numbers of them both in houses and in the woods) describe or mention
any more than one Horn. And those who do speak of another, yet make it a very small one, and
not over against the other, but on the forepart of his back, and so in a place where it is
immovable, and can no way be made use of for the tossing up of any thing, as the other on his
Nose.’

47. Parsons produced two paintings of the rhinoceros, one of which he kept and one of which
entered Mead’s collection. According to John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth
Century, 6 vols (London, 1812), vol. V.476, the first passed to Parsons’s widow, who died on 8
August 1786. The current picture was found in a storeroom at the British Museum in 1878 and
transferred to the Department of Zoology around the time that the natural history collections
were being moved to the new building at Kensington. Given the importance of Mead’s circle for
the holdings of the British Museum, I’m inclined to think it’s the one Mead owned (it does not
appear in the sale catalogue of his paintings). Interestingly, Nichols also recounts the debate
over one or two horns, even including the line from Martial’s Epigram 26. For the painting, see
Rookmaaker, ‘Two Collections of Rhinoceros Plates’, p.19, and John Thackray, The Natural
History Museum: A Catalogue of Portraits, Paintings, and Sculpture at the Natural History Museum,
London (London: Mansell, 1995), p.57, no. 115.

48. Charlotte Klonk, ‘Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture’, in Paul Smith and Carolyn
Wilde (eds), A Companion to Art Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p.474.

49. Wolfgang Klein, ‘Problems of Description in Art: Realism’, in John Bender and Michael
Marrinan (eds), Regimes of Description: In the Archives of the Eighteenth Century (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2005), p.79-94.

50. Petrus Camper, ‘Dissertatio de cranio rhinocerotis Africani, cornu gemino’, Acta
Academiae Scientiarum Imperialis Petropolitanae 2 (1780), p.193-209. See Miriam Claude Meijer,
Race and Aesthetics in the Anthropology of Petrus Camper (1722-1789) (Amsterdam, Rodopi,
1999), p.64.

51. As recounted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (London, 1791), p.494. Boswell
places the anecdote in May 1775. Five months later, during his only trip to the Continent,
Johnson himself saw the Versailles rhinoceros. Presumably aware of how much had rested on
the horns during the previous decades, Johnson takes note: ‘the horn broken and pared away,
which I suppose, will grow; the basis, I think, four inches cross’ (p.506). Confusion over the
question of one or two horns persisted in France too, as seen in the fact that the Duc de Croij

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mistakenly characterised the Versailles rhino as bi-corned, with the second horn to grow from
the shoulders; see Rookmaaker, The Rhinoceros in Captivity, p.96. For the Versailles rhino
generally, see Clarke, The Rhinoceros, p.69-70.

52. Arline Meyer, ‘Man’s Animal Nature: Science, Art, and Satire in Thomas Rowlandson’s
“Studies in Comparative Anatomy”, in Frank Palmeri (ed.), Humans and Other Animals in
Eighteenth-Century British Culture: Representation, Hybridity, Ethics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006),
p.119-36. As Meyer notes, Rowlandson would have been familiar with the collections of John
Hunter, William’s brother.

53. The tangled associations between the rhinoceros and the unicorn were perfectly suited for
Dalí’s personal mythology, prominent in both his work and self-presentation. See Dawn Ades
and Michael Taylor (eds), Dalí (New York: Rizzoli, 2004), p.456.

craig ashley hanson is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Calvin
College, Grand Rapids, MI, and the author, most recently, of The English Virtuoso: Art, Medicine, and
Antiquarianism in the Age of Empiricism (University of Chicago Press, 2009). He is working on a study
of Anglo-Dutch relations and the arts in early modern Britain, and an illustrated edition of John
Evelyn’s Sculptura.

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© 2010 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies