small flounders that covered themselves as if
with a cloak, and sea-slugs, and oysters, and
mussels; and all the creatures that can possibly
be got together in vivariums; and more than
have ever been got together before—with plenty
of marine foliage to promote their health and
enjoyment.

Much more than I can describe was in this
fish department; for there was never such a
museum before, and nothing has been left
out. All the bright-scaled fishes from the
Indian seas were there: the bat-fish with its
large overshadowing wings, the butterfly-fish
winged and peacock-spotted, the flying-fish, the
gorgeous chætodons, the sword-fish, our own
salmon—as parr and smoult and grilse; frightful
eels—not a variety wanting—singing-fish from
Ceylon, minnows and trout and perch, char
from the Cumberland lakes and anchovies from
the Italian seas; instances of all the eight
hundred named species now known to science, living
or preserved, and the larger ones stuffed. All the
whales—specially the mysticete or true whale, so
fast disappearing from the world of the northern
waters, and unable to cross or live in what is
to it the burning, foodless, sandy desert of the
tropical seas; the grass-eating manatee; the male
sea-elephant with a proboscis like his cousin of
the jungle and the walrus, with ivory tusks as
his likeness; the sea-lion and the sea-bear, the one
with a shaggy mane, the other with a thick coat
of fur; all the sharks, with their eggs done up
in mermaids' purses—the basking shark,
sometimes cast up on British shores, and thirty feet
long at least; the hammer-headed shark, and
the rays, and the skates, and the dog-fish
proceeding; riband-fishes forty feet long; sea snakes
in plenty; and the silvery vaagmaer not thicker
than a table-knife; things hitherto known only
by picture-books now to be seen for the first time
in perfect form and preservation; and the student
who wanted to know what the water world was
like, need only go in and study what was laid
out for him to see. But there was no
sea-serpent. Plenty of imitations, and creatures
which bad eyes have so often mistaken, and
loose lips sworn to as the veritable old snake
undoubted; but we have not caught him yet for
our museum, and I question much if we ever
shall. It was a strange gallery this, and a long
chain with, at one end of it, the fabulous
mermaid, or rather the dugong holding her young
to her breast with a fin that has a skeleton like
a hand within it, and at the other end things
that looked like seaweed, and wrack, and waving
flowers, and were of no higher organisation than
a bag of slimy jelly, sparingly gifted with a
certain power of digestion and reproduction.

Interesting, if unpleasant, was the reptile
room, full of crocodiles and lizards, tortoises,
frogs, and serpents. Some were very curious.
There were the lizards, strange pouched and
frilled things from the seething tropics, sketchy
beasts with starting eyes and rudimentary hands
for feet; flying lizards with fringed wings; and
lizards with leafy tails; lizards with ruffs and
collars round their necks, which they could
spread out like an umbrella or a fan; lizards of
all hues, brown, green, grey; including the
hideous iguana of the American woods—good
for eating, by-the-by—and the much-slandered
sharp-toed gecko; the broad-backed varanidæ,
likest to the fossil Saurians of all extant; and that
lovely little green jewel, all grace and life, to be
seen panting and flashing in the sunshine on
Italian walls. And there were our own newts
and efts, so deadly to tadpoles, which form a
connecting link between amphibia and lizards,
and belong, it would seem, indiscriminately to
either; as does the amphiuma of South America,
that thing like a four-footed eel, something
like a newt and a clumsy water-worm combined,
and the two-legged " siren"—not very like the
sirens of romance. And I saw the various
salamanders, from the enormous Japanese monster
lately introduced to the Zoological Gardens, to
that smaller creature about which such unnatural
fables were once believed, and such unblushing
falsehoods told; as well as the fossil
remains of that which good Andrew Scheuchzer
labelled " man, witness of the deluge," believing
he had found the geological testimony which not
the boldest sceptic could deny. Never dreaming,
honest man, that he had called the bones
of a frightful scaly voracious lizard, the bones
of our forefathers!

And then, following on to the newts and efts,
came the frogs and toads of English ponds and
foreign marshes—frogs in all their stages of
tadpole development, with enlarged models of the
more embryonic stages, and toads, big, bloated,
but maligned; bull-frogs, with their hideous
voices; small tree-frogs, or hylas, with their
knobbed toes; green frogs, edible and delicate;
Surinam toads or pipas, inconceivably hideous,
with their little ones lodging in cells on their
backs; the disgusting water reptile, called
protonopsis horrida, much dreaded by fishermen, and
with reason; and another protonopsis, found in
the torrents of the Alleghanies, and called the
alligator of the mountains, with which no one need
wish to covet a very near acquaintance. And
there were land tortoises, and marsh tortoises,
and river tortoises, and sea tortoises—more
properly turtles—who cry aloud when they are
troubled, and snap and hiss when ill at ease.
The poor sea turtles, which are eaten in soup at
Birch's, and their luckless land brethren which
are stripped of their bucklers for the adornment of
our women's heads; at least one, the testudo
imbricata, which can never keep its shell on its
back if caught sight of by a man with a stick
and sufficiently strong arms to turn it over
in the sand. There were specimens of all kinds,
the hawksbill and the coriaceous from the sea,
both bad for food, and the last poisonous; the
serpentina from the marsh, with a very small
buckler—beginning, indeed, to vanish into scales,
and as much like a crocodile as a tortoise; and
the fringed matamata, also a marsh beast, and
very odd in its appearance and development.

And then came the worms and the snakes;
entozoa, human and animal; earth-worms and
blind-worms; the amphisbœna, or creature