Bicorn

Just last Sunday, one of the estimated 20 surviving bicorne hats worn by Napoleon was sold at auction for €1.9mn, a price that vindicates the famous epigram, attributed to the emperor among others, that there is but one step separating the sublime from the ridiculous.

What a stir about nothing! Phenicopter is no more (pace Dr Septimus Wind and his eyriecal friend, Dr Eagles) than the common flamingo (simplex). Why ask such silly questions? What, for example, is a caterpillar? and why so denominated? There is the common quail as there is the common flag-beetle. A king (or queen) fisher might devour eaglets, but what is that to the spider in ordinary? and what has the spider to do with the Neapolitan tarentella? Unicorns and bicorns may be gregarious without even subterfuge or sideral ornament.

But as far as horned species are concerned, if these natural defences were the result of buntings, we should have races of unicorns, not bicorns, that is, the horns ought to have shot out on the spots of the natural “stimulus” from the foreheads, not from the sides!

Buttings and batterings mean that the points of impact would be the frontal portion of the skull, so that if such batterings and buttings had anything to do with the inducing the flow of blood thereto and the consequent inducement of growth, the result would have been unicorns, not bicorns in which the horns appeared at points not affected by the impacts.

Oooh, look, powdered horn of a Bicorn – don’t know where we’re going to get that …

Along with the unicorns, came the half-breed and mutated forms of unicorn: the bicorns and tricorns, and all the different breeds of ridgebacks, split-hooves, and pegasus.

Fig. 10.1 shows images of some apparently one-horned animals made by the ancient inhabitants of Persia (Iran and environs; 10. 1a), Mesopotamia (modern Iraq, along with parts of Syria, Turkey and Iran; 10.1b) and the Indus Valley (10.1c). They illustrate a venerable controversy: are we looking at unicorns, or bicorns in profile?

J’soun removed his helmet to reveal the two small horns atop his head. “Bicorns are the direct descendants of human and demon, though we are accepted by neither.[…]”