Regent's Park--by the knowledge and experience they have evinced in the
arrangements adopted in that establishment, and the good taste, skill,
and industry, they have employed in carrying into effect its multiplied
details--they have accomplished a task of far higher importance, and of
infinitely nobler character, than that of merely providing for all
classes of an enlightened metropolis an additional source of amusement
and recreation. Such a collection, so maintained and so displayed,
advances--slowly but certainly--the best interests of morals and
philosophy. The curiosity which it excites, the gratification it
affords, operate, though with differing degrees of intensity, on the
most uncultivated and the best informed of those who visit it, to beget
inquiry and awaken reflection; and in what can inquiry and reflection,
thus originated, determine, but in producing or extending the most
sublime impressions of the beneficence, the power, and the providence,
of the Great Author of Creation? The physical mechanism of birds, the
muscular energies of brutes, strike us at first with wonder, or move us
with mingled terror and delight; but the activity of the human mind will
not suffer us long to remain at this point of simple excitement. We
involuntarily begin to analyze the properties of animals, the relations
of their structure to those properties, the adaptation of the parts to
the whole of that structure, and the conformity of their physical
endowment and their instincts to the various _habitats_ or regions in
which they respectively exist. Whether we reason from causes to effects,
as from instinct to habit; or endeavour, upon an inverted process, to
arrive from the consideration of effects at causes, as from habit to
instinct; or attempt, upon the analysis and analogies of admitted facts
in the natural history of one animal, to deduce a theory of the history
of another,--we shall find this mysterious but beautiful chain of
relation and adaptation unbroken, impassable, perpetual.