Memoirs and observations made in a late journey through the Empire of China

English text from edition of London, 1697
Our Sojourning at Siam afforded us an opportunity, to view several particular Animals, which we seldom or never-see in Europe.
[509]
There is likewise to be seen your Rhinoceros’s, one of the oddest animals in the world, in my opinion, it hath some resemblance with a wild boar, only it is a little bigger, the feet of it somewhat thicker, and the body more clouterly shaped; its hide is covered all over with thick large scales, of a blackish colour, of an extraordinary hardness; they are divided into little squares, or buttons, rising about a quarter of an inch above the skin, in a manner like those of the crocodile; its legs seem to be engaged in a kind of boot, and its head wrap’d about behind with a flat capuche, or monks hood; which made the portuguese to call him the Indian monk: its head is thick and gross; its mouth not wide; its muzzle thrust out, and armed with a long thick horn, that makes him terrible to the very tygres, bufalo’s and elephants.
But that which seems the most admirable in this animal, is its tongue, which nature has covered with such a rough membrane, that it differs but little from a file, so that it flees off the skin of all that it licks. In a word, as we see some animals that make a good ragoust of thistles, whose little pricks tickle the fibres, or the extremities of the nerves of the tongue: so likewise your Rhinoceros, takes delight in easting branches of trees, armed on all sides with stiff thorns, I have often given it some of them, whose prickles were very hard and long, and I admired how cunningly and greedily it bended them immediatly, and champ’d them in its mouth without doing itself any harm. ’T is true indeed, they sometimes drew blood of him; but that very thing made them more pleasant to the tast; and these little slight wounds, made probably no other impression upon its tongue, than salt and pepper does upon ours.