* * * * *

"Observe how this infant colony, of which we are especially speaking,
has already been peopled! The majestic rusa, captured in the sultry
forests of Bengal, and the elegant gazelle, which has once bounded over
the parching deserts of Barbary, have become intimate and make their
couch with the white reindeer, brought from the icy wastes of Lapland.
The misshapen but harmless kangaroo of New Holland is a fellow-lodger
with the ferocious gnu of Southern Africa; and the patient llama, who
has left the snowy sides and precipitous defiles of the Andes,
contemplates without terror its formidable neighbours, the wolf of the
Pyrenees, and the bear of the stupendous mountains of Thibet. In the
immediate vicinity of the sacred bull, whose consecrated life has
heretofore been passed in luxurious freedom or insolent enjoyment on the
banks of the Ganges or the Jumna--feeds the gaunt and shaggy bison,
which crops with sullen tranquillity a herbage more nutritious but less
grateful to him than he loved to cull among the stony pastures of the
Alleghany range, or of the howling solitudes surrounding Hudson's Bay.
Though thousands of leagues have interposed between the arid sands from
which they have been imported into this peaceful and common home, the
camel of the Thebais, as he ruminates in his grassy _parterre_, surveys
with composed surprise the wild dog of the Tierra del Fuego and the
sharp-eyed dingo of Australia. Around the ghastly sloth-bear,
disentombed from his burrows in the gloomiest woods of Mysore or
Canara--and his more lively congener of Russia--the armadillo of Brazil
and the pine marten of Norway display a vivacity of action and a
cheerfulness of gesture which captivity seems powerless to repress. The
elephant of Ceylon, and the noble wapiti of the Canadas, repose beneath
the same roof; and from his bath, or his pavilion, the Arctic bear
contemplates--not his native rocks and solitudes, the crashing of