SOME PRIVATE ZOOS. 693 



offer any striking variety of scenery, never, on the other hand, looks 

 as dour as the north country, in the barrenness of which the master of 

 Haggerston has made his paradise. In addition to its sheep and cattle 

 and shire horses, domesticated types that stand apart from ^he wilder 

 subjects of these notes, Tring has close on a hundred Japanese and 

 fallow deer, about thirty kangaroos and wallabies, rather less than a 

 score of enuis, and some rlieas and cassowaries. These great struthi- 

 ous birds do not all accommodate themselv^es to captivity with the 

 same thoroughness. Thus, while the emus hatch out regularly yeai- 

 after year, the cassowaries never get beyond the laying stage. 



The private museum at Tring, which was mentioned above, must l)e 

 one of the finest of its kind in the world. 1 have met Mr. Rothschild's 

 collectors at work in southern islands and continents; and on one 

 occasion 1 traveled some 12,000 miles in companj^ with mj^sterious 

 chests addressed to him, the contents of which 1 subsequent!}^ had the 

 pleasure of seeing in their new quarters. In the working rooms of 

 his museum he studies and writes about the pheasants and other 

 groups of l)irds in which he takes a special interest, and his pheasant- 

 ries contain half a dozen species, including the elegant pheasant, not 

 found elsewhere alive m Europe except at Berlin. It w^ould be unpar- 

 donable to write, however briefly, of Mr. Rothschild and Tring with- 

 out some allusion to his successful domestication of the Burchell zebra, 

 which he was in the habit of driving in harness. Those who know 

 an3'thing of zebra morals will admire his enterprise. Those who have 

 a regard for him and his work will not be sorry to hear that he has 

 handed the contumacious brutes over to a cousin who resides in 

 France. 



I have already admitted that my visits to both Leonardslee and Va}'- 

 nol were made under seasonal conditions that showed those beautiful 

 places at their fairest. The memory of Leonardslee on the last day of 

 April is as of a corner of the Kew hothouses gone astra}^, with all their 

 wealth of rhododendrons and camellias, a wild conglomeration of half 

 the zoological and botanical regions that lie between the Tropics and 

 the Poles. Here we stand beneath a 90-foot fir tree from the icy 

 north and gaze on prancing gazelles from the Arabian Desert; we 

 move into the slighter shade of dwarf firs from the Atlas Mountains; 

 wallabies from Australia and axis deer from the East gaze wonder- 

 ingl}' at us from behind bushes of American origin. The trees and 

 shrubs, like the beasts and birds, have apparentl}' made themselves 

 quite at home on a soil so poor that nature would seem to have destined 

 it for the maintenance of nothing above mean and lowly heaths. A 

 closer inspection of the Leonardslee Zoo reveals the thorough wildness 

 of the animals. Here, within .5 miles of Horsham, rej^resentative 

 groups of the fauna of three continents run as free as in their own 

 lands. The skill of the vet can never reach them; Dallmeyer's tele- 



