316 ANIMAL ACCLIMATIZATION 



paradise. The park is high and undulating, with a 

 number of rounded hillocks and elevations. In conse- 

 quence of the persistent downfall of rain, and the wet- 

 ness of the pasture, the animals had betaken themselves 

 to the high ground ; and there on the sky-line were 

 seen outlined forms so familiar, yet so strange in their 

 setting, that the visitor might almost incline to doubt 

 whether he were in possession of his waking senses or 

 dreaming of pictures in Catlin's ' North American 

 Indians.' On one hill, for instance, lay sleeping four 

 American bison and a herd of wapiti-deer. The round, 

 humped outlines of the former were seen across a great 

 space of grass, for here the park was treeless, and the 

 animals, though confined in large enclosures of some 

 twenty acres each, looked exactly as they must have 

 appeared before the days of their destruction on the 

 rolling prairies of the North- West. 



The mixture of species, far from being incongruous, 

 is most effective. Close by a long avenue of chestnut- 

 trees in blossom was a chance gathering of animals 

 from the Highlands of Scotland and from far Thibet. 

 Four or five small herds of red deer were feeding, 

 mingled with some thirty or forty splendid Highland 

 cattle of all colours, with rough shaggy coats and long 

 horns. Some were black, some red, some smoke- 

 coloured, some of the pinkish-gray seen in soap-stone 

 and in the shaggy coats of these light-coloured moor- 



