Horn

a modification of the skin, forming the nails, claws, hoofs, horns, scales, and beak covering of animals. Roughly speaking, horn is composed essentially of hair and glue. Assuming the hair to be the fundamental form of the appendage or modification, a nail would be regarded as a curtain or fringe of hair, the separate hairs of which lie parallel and are consolidated into one piece of thin, shell-like horn. When these consolidated hairs increase in length, that is to say, grow longer, we say the nail needs trimming. The hoofs of animals are to be regarded in the same light as the nails of a person's toes and feet. In other words, these horny defenses are to be regarded as flattened, consolidated, that is to say, glued, hardened locks of hair. Likewise, the claws of a cat or dog or of a fowl are to be considered as tufts of hair which have become glued together and hardened into conical or variously shaped and curved pieces of horn. They are not bone; they have no more connection with the skeleton of an animal than the hair on one's head has. The hard, bony covering of a bird's bill is likewise to be looked upon as a tress of hair, or feather, the individual hairs of which in a glutinous mass have cohered and consolidated to form a thin, protective shell of horn, which gives the bill its stiffness and protects the tender portions within. The scales of the tortoise are said to be somewhat similar in origin. If what has been said of other horny coverings be true, it requires no great stretch of the imagination to believe that the scales of a fish are flattened, hardened, tufts of hair.

The horns of the ox, buffalo, bison, goat, and antelope are known as true horns, and are to be distinguished from antlers. The antlers of the deer, moose, reindeer and other animals of the deer family are not of horn but bone. They are true extensions of the bone of the forehead. A pair of soft processes or growths spring from the forehead and grow very rapidly into the shape of the future antler. At first they are exceedingly soft, and are charged with blood and covered with a soft fuzz called velvet. In a short time the living material supplied by the blood hardens into bone, when the velvet rubs off and the antlers are perfect. Antlers of this sort are shed each year, when a new and larger bony growth takes their place. Antlers are solid. True horns, like those of the ox and sheep, are hollow and permanent. Their base surrounds a living, pointed core that supplies materials for growth. The hollow horn can be regarded as a circle of hair which surrounds the core and has become consolidated into a continuous cylindrical horn. Viewed in this light, a curling ram's horn is merely a curling lock or tuft of hair growing out in front of the ear. Viewed as tufts of hair growing out stiff and straight, or waving in graceful curves or spirals, the horns of an animal have a peculiar tress-like appearance. The transition from a mass of cohesive hair into a hardened horn may be seen actually taking place on the head of the prong horn, a deer-like animal of the West, commonly, but, as we may see, wrongly, called an antelope.

See Hair; Feathers; Deer; Antelope