ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS—LOISEL. 419 
This snake cage was also provided with trunks of trees, and it 
was further ornamented by flowers and green plants upon which were 
climbing green and gray lizards or chameleons from northern Africa, 
and among them there flew about cardinals with their red heads. If 
T add that numerous globes of electric light illuminate it until 11 
p- m., when the snakes, nocturnal animals, are in full activity; if I say 
further that the visiting public finds itself in a hothouse where is 
cultivated a part of the Mediterranean flora, I would give but a feeble 
idea of this beautiful installation, which I did not find equaled in 
other gardens. 
There are still other installations of animals at Manchester, which 
repay a visit. I will mention a basin for sea lions that communicates 
with a large covered fish pond having seats about it like an amphi- 
theater. Here the public may witness the droll evolutions of three 
California sea lions that climb stairways, jump off an elevated plat- 
form, jump over perches or through hoops, hold on to trapezes, ete. 
PRIVATE MENAGERIES AND PRESERVES OF WILD ANIMALS. 
A very large number of English and Scotch proprietors like to keep 
wild animals near their homes. Some of them, such as Sir Cl. Alex- 
ander, at Faygate Wood, Horsham, Sussex, and Sir Robert Lead- 
hatter, at Hazlemere (Bucks), have veritable menageries, with hons, 
pumas, leopards, hyenas, or wolves; others prefer aviary birds, such 
is Sir D. Seth-Smith, who possesses about 200 foreign birds. Most 
of the other large proprietors raise in their parks deer, gazelles, 
moufllons, goats, and exotic sheep, as well as cranes, flamingoes, rheas, 
cassowaries, eagles, and owls. 
Many of these parks are vast expanses of meadow or wood, taken 
from the old forests and inclosed by walls or fosses at the time of the 
Norman conquest. In a certain number of them openings have been 
made in such a manner that the deer of the neighborhood can easily 
enter, but can not return. 
In Whitaker’s Almanac for 1892 there are enumerated 395 of these 
parks, inclosing 68,331 head of fallow deer and 5,477 of red deer, in 
England alone, without counting those of Scotland and Ireland. I 
could not think of visiting them all, but some of them deserved atten- 
tion, either because of their special interest or of the importance of 
their collections. 
Preserves for wild cattle——I thought best to first seek those antique 
parks where still live some herds of wild cattle, descendants, if we 
may believe Sir Walter Scott (who appears to have been mistaken), 
of those Tauri silvestres or aurochs, which were, as he says in one of 
his poems— 
Mightiest of all the beasts of chase 
That roam in wooded Caledon. 
