30 THE ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



Another interesting event was referred to in this address — 

 the recent gift by Mohammed Ali to George IV. of a young 

 Nubian giraffe, the first example of the species brought alive to 

 England. The merchant vessel conveying the giraffe and the 

 cows which provided it with milk arrived at the wharf by 

 Waterloo Bridge on Saturday, August 11, 1827, and the animals 

 were at once stabled in a warehouse under the Duchy of 

 Lancaster office. Here they remained in charge of the native 

 keepers till Monday, when Mr. Cross took them to Windsor in a 

 caravan, and the giraffe was lodged in a commodious hut, with 

 the range of a spacious paddock at the Sandpit Gate. It was 

 then about a year and a half old, and stood 10 ft. 8 in. high."^ 



In the Literary Gazette (December 1, 1827) R. B. Davis, who 

 had many opportunities of closely observing the animal while 

 painting its portrait for George IV., described its limbs as 

 deformed by the treatment it had experienced at the hands of 

 the Arabs on the overland journey from Sennaar to Cairo. It 

 was occasionally confined on the back of a camel ; and when 

 " they huddled it together for this purpose they were not nice in 

 the choice of cords or the mode of applying them." f While 

 the artist was at work he observed that the giraffe still bore the 

 marks of what it must have suffered, though it was improving 

 in form and the joints were losing their disproportion to the 

 limbs. It was probably at this time that he noticed there were 

 " no teeth or nippers in the upper jaw," and that the two outside 

 ones [in the lower jaw] were " divided to the socket." This 

 division or lobation attracted no attention from naturalists till its 

 rediscovery by Prof. Ray Lankester, who used it in proof of the 

 relationship of the giraffe to the okapi,t in which the teeth 

 are similarly lobed. 



Although formal possession of the lake was not given to the 



* The Literary Gazette of August 25, 1827, from which these particulars are 

 taken, has this note : In 1810 a white camel was imported, with an elephant, 

 into this country. This white camel being a novelty, the proprietor, then living 

 in Piccadilly, turned his attention to making it still more of a novelty, caused 

 it to be artificially spotted, and produced it to the public as " a camelopard just 

 arrived." 



t This seems to have been the normal mode of transport adopted by the Arabs 

 at that time. The giraffes obtained by Warwick for the Surrey Gardens were 

 treated in a similar way. 



X Tramaetiona of the Zoological Society, xvi. 290. 



