30 SUNSHINE AND SPORT IN 



the last few years is accounted marvellous. A 

 moving peat bog stood where seals now gambol in 

 a pond. Two or three thousand feet of well- 

 drained deer ranges, crowned with an intermittent 

 fringe of oak and cedar, top the summits of granite 

 ridges that still show the chastening hand of glacial 

 action. Back of all is a wild forest scene of oak, 

 maple and cedar, the wood and foliage of which 

 screen the great city that stretches to the very 

 margin of the park and frame gleaming lakes, the 

 home of mallard and white-fronted geese. Some 

 of the birds are not even pinioned. On all sides is 

 such evidence of the joy of life as I know nothing 

 like in any other menagerie. In Old World zoos, 

 many of them, like our own, excellent as far as 

 they go, indoor accommodation is of the first im- 

 portance. At every turn bricks and mortar meet 

 the eye, and the open-air life is enjoyed only here 

 and there in some small paddock or annexe as a 

 rare change from the dungeons. Impatience of 

 such incarceration has lately manifested itself at 

 Dublin, where the lions are now kept out of doors 

 all the year round, with capital results in the in- 

 crease of stock, for which the Irish Zoo has always 

 been noted. In most European Zoos such confined 

 hospitality is enjoined alike by the climate, which 

 brings an element of risk into all attempts at ac- 

 climatising exotic forms, and by the existence of 

 vested rights of land tenure, which preclude en- 

 croachment on the vicinity by so much as an acre. 



At Bronx, on the other hand, the permanent 

 buildings are the least impressive feature. If a 

 humble admirer of their present success may offer 

 a word of counsel to the authorities, it is that they 



