LION & UNICORN

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 October 1939, Page 5

LION & UNICORN

WHISPERS OF A STRANGE DISCOVERY. Startling news comes from Yugoslavia, and if what is being whispered there should prove to be true a new interest will be given to our old rhym, about the lion and the unicorn.fighting for the crown. , I For a thousand years or more the unicorn was one of the best known of all animals. Though imaginary, it was familiar to everyone, for it was mentioned in stories and seen on coats-of-arms. The old royal arms of Scotland were supported by two unicorns, and when James of Scotland became James of England in 1603 one of his unicorns shared with the lion the honour of supporting his arms. It was no doubt about this time that the rhyme came to us: The lion and the unicorn Were fighting for the crown; The lion beat the unicorn And drove him out of town. Now comes the first whisper of something to astonish us, for a curious discovery is said to have been made near Sibenik on the Dalmatian coast. Possibly we shall find that the rumour is only a rumour, but at the moment scientists in Yugoslavia are talking of i skull brought to light in the Sibenik grottoes a few weeks ago. Here have been found the remains of animals which lived in Europe before the Ice

Age, and the whisper we have heard is that among the relics is the skull of a great deer with only one horn. Whether this is really so we do not know. The experts may dispose of the, notion as absurd, cr they may verify the theory already put forward tha' there was once in Europe a kind of deer with a single horn projecting from its forehead, and that our stories of unicorns have sprung from a dim remembrance of them in the minds of primitive races.

It is all fascinating; find thrilling it would be to know that the unicorn so long familiar to us in heraldy has an ancestry going back 10,000 years or mere.