232



Correspondence , Notes , etc.



The epithet applied to the Pelicans is good—“stupendous,”—yet to an

age which used strong words to express insignificant situations and to

whom everything was vastly becoming and vastly entertaining it would not

seem incongruous. I see also that I have written myself above “immensely

amuse”—the same idea therefore but the fashion of words change. The

description given by the handbill is naive, and carries us back to a delight¬

fully early period in the study of zoology, when the world was easily and

often charmed and delighted by discoveries of new animals and new

species. The freshness of things has passed away, we now fall back on the

study of sub-species. Then there is the mention of the taking of Belgrade

by Marshal Landohn. This fixes the date. The capture of the city took

place in 1789, and two years is about the time it would have taken for the

spoils of war to have travelled across Europe to England. The taking of

Belgrade takes us back to a forgotten war, one of the many conflicts

between Austria and Turkey, and Marshal Landohn, although now an

utterly forgotten soldier, was one who fought so well in the better

remembered Seven Years War that he earned the respect of his adversary

Frederick the Great.


And the Elephant also attracted in his day the affection of London

siglit-seers as Elephants have been accustomed to do ever since. This one

was, I believe, he who for a long time was the pet of London and whose

bones we still look upon at the College of Surgeons. How different his

voyage to that of one of his kind nowadays. Not on the deck of a

P. and O. spending three short weeks steaming through the Red Sea and

the Mediterranean, but boxed up 011 the “Rose Indiaman ” under full sail,

or under bare poles rounding the stormy Cape.


Even in 1791, however, both Pelicans and Elephants had ceased to be

novelties, having been known from ancient times. It would not have

surprised any learned man of the time to hear that the Marshal had found

Pelicans in a garden of an Eastern town, or that a Warren Hastings had

sent home an Elephant as a present to his countrymen. But how different

was the case of the Kangaroos. It was only 21 years previousl}', in 1770,

that Captain Cook had seen them for the first time, and it was in 17S8, three

years before, that Captain Phillips, taking out the first batch of convicts to

Botany Bay, had been made first Governor of New South Wales, and now

returning in the good ship “ Atlantic,” he brings home these strange beasts,

the like of which he had never seen before, to gratify the curiosity of

learned and unlearned as well.


Yet a reduction of 6d. on the three nights was not enough, and the

grim horror of the Guillotine, which in 1791 was busily engaged in France

doing its fearful work, was thrown in, so that hesitating aviculturists and

zoologists might have an extra and irresitible inducement to plank down

their half-crowns.



