516 THE EOYAL MENAGERIE OF FRANCE. 



Perhaps, however, none of these had the importance of the solemn 

 entrance, on June 30, 1827, of dame giraffe into the good city of Paris. 



Everyone wished to see her, all the newspapers were full of her, 

 articles and songs were written about her, and fashion, that other dis- 

 penser of glory, used her forms and colors to make the giraffe dress, 

 the giraffe hat, the giraffe comb. Nevers had poly chromic crockery; 

 Spinal, illuminated images that represented the celebrated visitor. 

 Even politics meddled with her, and some amateurs possess in their 

 collections a bronze medal upon which is seen the giraffe addressing 

 the country in terms similar to the historic words used by the Oomte 

 d'Artois in 1814,1 "Nothing is changed in France; there is only * * * 

 one beast more." I need not explain why this medal quickly became 

 very rare. 



G-iraffe, hippopotamus, chimpanzee, etc., all these animals assembled 

 together, sometimes to the number of 1,300 to 1,400, have constituted a 

 special school of instruction that for one hundred years has played a 

 most important part. As Isidore Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire wrote in 1860, 

 if the menagerie had not existed and had not been enriched from the 

 very first with a great number of rare species, Cuvier would never have 

 been able at the beginning of our century to publish his Comparative 

 Anatomy and to prepare in this way a new life for zoology and the 

 birth of palaeontology; and l^tienne Geoffroy would not in his turn, 

 twenty years later, have written his Philosophical Anatomy. I will 

 add, that if it had not been for the menagerie Isidore Geoffroy himself, 

 Blainville, Duvernoy, H.-Milue Edwards, P. Gervais, Gratiolet, and 

 many others would not have brought together the materials for the 

 memoirs with which they have enriched science. 



Without the menagerie Frederic Cuvier, who was an aid there as 

 early as 1805, would not have written his studies on the instinct and 

 intelligence of animals, etc. Without the menagerie the remarkable 

 studies of M. Alphonse-Milne Edwards would not have been concluded, 

 and we would doubtless be unacquainted with the conditions of hybrid- 

 ization among the pithecoid apes, the equidte, the bovidse, etc.^ With- 

 out the menagerie many species of herbivorse and a number of useful 

 birds would not be acclimated in our country, and the museum would 

 not have been able to renew, in a degree, the great fauna of our forests.^ 



1 It is now known that this saying was ascribed to the Comte d'Artois by Beugnot. 

 (Memoires, pages 112-114; Paris, 1886.) 



2 Hybrids have been obtained at the museum by crossing the magot with the 

 macaque, the magot with the cynocephalus, the macaque with various pouched 

 monkeys, the horse witli the onager, the horse with the zebra, the zebra with the 

 onager, the ass with the onager, the zebra with the ass, the yak with the cow (the 

 male is infertile, the female fertile), etc. 



^The names of some of the species acclimated in the Jardin are as follows: The 

 onager and the sambur deer brought by Duesumier, the pig deer, the sika deer of 

 Japan, the muntjak deer of China, the gnu, the moufflon of the Atlas Mountains, 

 the Egyptian goose, the black swan, the emeu which we owe to Peron, the nandou, 

 the Chinese crane introduced by Moutiguy, numerous pheasants, etc. 



