Title The Unicorn: A Mythological Investigation Series --- Author Robert Brown Cover Art --- Publisher Longmans, Green, and co. - 1881 First Printing Longmans, Green, and co. - 1881 Category Reference Warnings --- Main Characters --- Main Elements Unicorns

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Odell Shepard, the author of The Lore of the Unicorn, has this to say about Brown's work: "This book is badly written and arranged; the author shows little knowledge of the European legend of the unicorn and he says nothing about the astrologico-magical ideas of the moon which are most germane to this thesis; he is inaccuarate, incautious, disposed to generalize upon insufficient data, and not above wrenching a disputed or disputable points to his purpose. It is, in short, a wild book, but, like all its author's productions, a brilliant one, full of recondite learning and startling surmises."

Having read The Lore of the Unicorn, a book careful to argue both sides of a point, to explore alternatives and not even attempt to claim any of his beliefs are the correct one, I have to agree with Shepard's comment. The first third of Brown's book does little but put in writing the description of some carvings, of which the images themselves are not included so you have to try to picture them in your mind. I would suspect many of this "unicorns" are just dual-horned animals drawn in profile, such that the the horns line up so they appear as one. Also I can imagine leaving out a horn, particularly branching ones, to simplify the artwork. Shepard's work, being scholarly, is not exactly a wild exciting ride of literature, but Brown's book was putting me to sleep (thankfully it is about 100 pages long)...mind you the lack of images to go along with the descriptions really increased the boredom factor, reading "and the goat like unicorn in this seal", and the "cow like unicorn in this carving", and the "antelope like unicorn drawing" becomes repetitive really fast. It did however make me wish I had some way of looking up the images he described.

And to be honest, though the title includes the word unicorn, it is really an investigation into lunar mythology, a good portion of the book doesn't even include anything remotely unicorn related (in fact more time might have been spent discussing the Gorgon, and lions certainly get more coverage as a solar symbol).

So for me, the most interesting aspect of this book, which happened to be something I got from my university's library, was the fact that it appears to be a first edition from 1881, holding something that old was interesting in itself, and the fact it came from my universtity drove home the fact that this book is not intended for the casual reader in the first place. I don't find it even particularly useful for someone doing academic research on unicorns.

My copy doesn't have a dust jacket but I found this image of the first page which matches my edition so using that as a cover image!