"walking both ways," frightful but harmless,
and a " link;" small flat-headed vipers and
adders, whip-snakes and black snakes—among the
deadliest of all—puff-adders and horned-adders,
rattlesnakes, cobras, and pythons; and the
skeletons and localities of each, and what their
habits and what their character, and what the
colonist had better do if bitten by any of them
abroad. But I did not linger long among the
snakes, graceful as they are, and lovely in line and
colour. There is a kind of instinctive enmity
between them and man, which makes them
dreaded even when battened down under glass
hatches, and not delighted in when preserved in
spirits and coiled within bottles. From the
reptiles to the mammalia was but a step; and I
made it gladly.

But I am not writing a catalogue, so I cannot
go through a hundredth part of the eight
thousand specimens contained in this department.
There were all the elephants—great clumsy
beasts; the elephant from the Himalaya,
which in its youth is covered with hair—
a transitional condition of modern elephants,
but permanent in their forefathers, the
mammoths—white elephants, and other Asiatics,
smaller-eared and more intelligent than their
clumsier African brethren; rhinoceroses,
two-horned, from Africa and Sumatra—the Sumatran
the most like the fossil rhinoceros of all, and
hairy in its youth—and one-horned from Central
Asia, Java, and Borneo; three of each variety—
male, female, and young; wild pigs and boars
with bristling tusks, and home-fed porkers with
eloquent suggestions about them; and all the
other pachydermata, down to the little donkey
foal on the common. And then there were
camels and dromedaries, cushion-footed for the
desert; and llamas, which are the South
American camels, with strong curved nails for climbing
rocks. And the llamas seemed to me transitional,
being as much like big-boned sheep as
camels, and passing by easy steps into vicuñas,
long-haired and silky, and merinos also with long
silky tresses, then into moufflons, the moufflons
becoming in time fat-tailed sheep and woolly-
backed southdowns. The goats, again, seemed
but a variety on the one side of the wild sheep of
the mountains, and of clean-limbed deer on the
other. For, the ibex is as much deer as goat
to look at, and the prong-horn, an antelope,
is as often called " the goat" as anything else.
And so I passed on to the large family of
the cervidæ, the reindeer, red deer, and moose
deer, with the antelopes of Africa too
numerous to mention, and the lovely little gazelles,
and the musk-deer of India, the smallest thing
of its kind that goes. Branching off in another
direction, by the nylghau and the gnu, to the
buffaloes and bulls and bisons, and sleek white
Brahminee cows, worth more than a man's life in
Hindustan. These oxen are strange beasts, too.
The grunting yak, the shaggy musk-ox with hair
that can be spun like silk, and that has been spun
like silk, the big American buffalo, and the
dainty little Breton milker that you can tether
on your lawn, our own sleek Alderneys, and
brisker Highland blackies, have many points of
likeness certainly, but very many of difference.
The horse tribe keeps more together; but the
dogs range as wild and wide as any. A wolf
and a little King Charles's spaniel are not
very much alike, yet they grow in successive
steps, odd as it may seem, and to many, doubtful.

And then I turned to the dangerous classes, the
leopards and panthers and tigers; lions, rnaned
and orthodox, and the maneless from Guzerat;
the puma, or South American version of this king
of beasts; the cheetah, or hunting leopard;
tiger-cats, ocelots, and the pampas cat—more
like a domestic puss in form than the gaunt
Egyptian cat; ounces and jaguars, lynxes booted
at the feet and tasseled at the ear; the wild
English cat, very rare now, and found only in
the north; bringing up before the tortoiseshell
tabby lapping milk by the home fireside. Weasels
and skunks and martens and ferrets and polecats,
the ermine with its spotless fur, and others
tell me that they, and many more, belong to
the order of the Mustelidæ; and this museum has
a beautiful specimen of each, set in its proper
surroundings, not all huddled together in one
case—the arctic with the tropical—and no sign
of their natural condition about them. Then
there were wolves and foxes and bears and
racoons and hedgehogs, and the pretty little
chinchilla in its suit of soft grey, and its congener,
the viscacha or marmot-Diana, from South
America; the civet and the genet, both with
odoriferous pouches; the brown coati, the ugly
meerat, and the souslik rat, bringing us by
gradations I cannot follow to the true " rodentia."
So I looked at the rats and the mice, the dormice
and the guinea-pigs, the beavers and porcupines,
hares and rabbits and jumping hares, jerboas,
kangaroo rats, capybaras, agoutis, and pacas,
squirrels and flying squirrels, the aye-aye—looking
like a monkey, and as much monkey as
squirrel—and I wondered at the links which
make a rat the ancestor of an ape.

Thus, then, are the bats, the vampire bat, and
the large and fleshy cruel-looking pteropina, very
unlike our pretty little flitter-mice that skim
through the evening air, and frighten bare-headed
girls by getting caught and entangled in their
hair. And I saw by what beautiful gradations
they pass into the lemuridæ; and the lemurs
are degraded monkeys, or, perhaps, monkeys
are selected lemurs. But monkeys have nothing
half so pretty as the graceful little loris, or that
tender-souled creature called Bashful Billy, so
loving and so sensitive, to whom the Hindus
give the same name as they give to the sensitive
plant, dajjalu. But before I went over to the
"quadrumana" as represented by the monkeys—
the lemurs are quadrumana, or four-handed, too
—I walked to the cases where the ornithorhynchus
takes three several characteristics to
himself; where the opossums and kangaroos,
and that hideous Tasmanian wolf, and others of
the marsupials, set the fashion of pockets long
before man was born; where the wombat is like
a bad copy of a bear, and the ursine opossum