8 BEASTS AND MEN 
During the latter half of the nineteenth century Africa 
was being vigorously explored, and large consignments of 
animals—especially elephants, giraffes and rhinoceroses— 
began to arrive in Europe from that continent. In the 
early sixties we began to deal on a larger scale, and I 
frequently had to undertake journeys for business purposes, 
my first visit to England being in 1864. The trade became 
more flourishing, necessitating an extension of our premises 
in Spielbudenplatz, and in this same year of 1864 an important 
development occurred. Late one evening we received a 
telegram from a friend in Vienna, saying that the African 
traveller, Lorenzo Cassanova, had arrived in the Austrian 
capital ex voute for Dresden, whither he was taking a number 
of animals which he had collected in Nubia. About a year 
and a half earlier Cassanova had brought home an enormous 
consignment of wild beasts from the Egyptian Sudan, includ- 
ing the first African elephant which had ever been seen in 
Europe, several giraffes, and numerous smaller creatures. 
On that occasion we could not afford 
to buy his collection, and the animals 
were eventually acquired by the 
famous old menagerie owner, Gottlieb 
Kreutzberg ; but this time the collec- 
tion was much smaller, and on the 
| morning after the receipt of the tele- 
gram I set out for Dresden. I found 
Cassanova in the Zoological Gardens, 
where he had housed his animals, and 
before long the whole collection had 
come into my possession. This, how- 
ever, was not the only or the most important result of my 
meeting with the Italian; for after some discussion we con- 
cluded an agreement to the effect that all the animals which 
Cassanova succeeded in bringing to Europe from his future 
expeditions should be sold to us at definite prices named in 
the contract. Cassanova was thus the first of that long list 
Gottlieb Kreutzberg. 
