When a herd of hippopotamuses in the Nile River becomes tired of a diet of water plants, they climb up higher and steeper banks than you could climb, break into fields and eat wheat and sugar cane. Just think of having a drove of animals in your corn field as big as elephants with their legs sawed off, with stomachs that hold five bushels, and with the table manners of pigs! Then, sometimes, they like to plaster their red and brown and gray-splotched, hairless bodies with mud, and go to sleep in the sun just like pigs. The only thing that will keep them out of a field is a bon-fire. Practically all wild animals are afraid of fire. That is a good thing to remember if you ever go camping in the woods or mountains.
It is the rhinoceros, or nose horn, that ought to have hippo (horse) in his name. He is a very distant relation of the horse. He has teeth like a horse and a three-toed foot. The horse, today, has only one toe in a solid hoof, but in his leg are two splints where, ages and ages ago, there were two more toes that dwindled away and disappeared. No horse, wild or tame, or any of his near relatives, the zebras, wild ponies or donkeys, has a horn. So, perhaps, you will not be surprised to learn that a rhinoceros' horn isn't a horn at all, nor even a tusk. It is more like a corn.
This is the difference: A tusk is an overgrown tooth, a horn grows from the bones of the head, a finger nail is a sort of horny substance that grows from the flesh, a corn is a thickening of the skin. You get a corn on a toe where a shoe rubs or pinches. In rooting about for his food, or in fighting, the rhinoceros may have bumped his nose and kept on bumping it until a "corn" grew there. That "corn" is really a tuft of stiff bristles cemented together with a kind of horny glue. Around the base of it the thick hide grows in leathery folds, and the outer layer of the "corn" often peels back in shreds, like the rough bark fibre on a cocoanut shell. If you watch a rhinoceros in a cage, you may see his nose-horn move when he wrinkles his thick, over-hanging lip and forehead.
Except that he is a huge, nearly hairless beast who likes to wallow in the mud and water, the rhinoceros is not in the least like the hippopotamus. His legs, while thick, are longer, and lift his body higher from the ground. His head tapers to a pointed muzzle, and he has the upright, nervous ears of the horse. A regular wild horse in armor he is, for his thick, leathery skin is laid on him in folds that overlap at the natural joints of his body. Having such a weapon right between and below his eyes, where it is always in
