INTRODUCTION. Xl 
opportunities of investigation may be regarded as the 
principal cause of this lamentable deficiency. Some of 
the rarer animals, it is true, were occasionally to be 
seen in Kurope; but Menageries constructed upon a 
broad and comprehensive plan were as yet unknown. 
The first establishment of modern days, in which such 
a plan can fairly be said to have been realised, was the 
Menagerie founded at Versailles by Louis the Four- 
teenth. It is to this institution that we owe the Natural 
History of Buffon and his coadjutor Daubenton; the 
one as eloquent as Pliny, with little of his credulity, but 
with a greater share of imagination; and the other a 
worthy follower of Aristotle in his habits of minute 
research and patient investigation, but making no pre- 
tensions to the powerful and comprehensive mind and 
the admirable facility of generalising his ideas which so 
preeminently distinguished that great philosopher. 
Of the characters of most of the institutions which we 
have noticed the Tower Menagerie has at various times 
partaken in a greater or less degree. Originally intended 
merely for the safe-keeping of those ferocious beasts, 
which were until within the last century considered as 
appertaining exclusively to the royal prerogative, it has 
occasionally been converted into a theatre for their con- 
tests, and has terminated by adapting itself to the present 
condition of society as a source of rational amusement 
and a school of zoological science. 
The first notice of a Royal Menagerie in England 
places this establishment at Woodstock, where King 
Henry the First had a collection of lions, leopards, and 
other strange beasts. Three leopards were presented to 
Henry the Third by the Emperor Frederic the Second, 
himself a zoologist of no mean rank. From Woodstock 
