8 



CHAPTER II. 



GKEAT as have been the advantages of menageries, 

 in bringing immediately under the eyes of every 

 observer animals which would otherwise be hardly kno^vn, 

 except from books, or from theh remains preserved 

 in museums, they have, it must be confessed, been fatal 

 to romance. The exaggerated proportions which tra- 

 vellers have assigned to birds and beasts — ay, and men 

 — partly from seeing the objects at a distance, and 

 partly from the highly-colom'ed and, in many in- 

 stances, imperfectly-understood accounts of the natives, 

 shrink when the living creature is before the spectator. 

 In such cases truth — like the best pictures of the Italian 

 masters, which are not satisfactory at fii'st, especially to 

 those who have admired the extravagances, however 

 poetical, of a Fuseli — looks poorly; and it is only after 

 consideration that the mind becomes reconciled to the 

 light, before which errors and false pretensions vanish. 



How many who have read of the condor till he has 

 been almost magnified into the roc of Arabian story, have 

 been disappointed at the first sight of those birds which 

 have been kept so long at the garden of the Zoological 

 Society of London! I can hardly call to mind one who 

 has so seen them in my presence, whose expectations had 

 not gone far beyond what he then saw. To say nothing 

 of more general romantic statements, eighteen feet have 

 been given as the actual measurement across the ex- 

 panded wings of the great vultm-e of the Andes. The 

 old male belonging to the society, a very fine specimen, 

 measures eleven feet from tip to tip when his wings are 

 outstretched ; his length does not exceed four feet nine 

 inches. Both he and his partner, notwithstanding their 



