HAMLYN'S MENAGERIE MAGAZINE. 
Divisional Ammunition Park, and the 8th and 
10th Batteries of the 2nd Brigade of the 1st 
Canadian Contingent. As companions in their 
cage they have one Syrian bear and one brown 
bear. 
The Warwickshire's black buck are pretty 
little creatures with spiral horns and spindle legs 
and sentimental eyes. They cast timid, pathetic 
glances at the few passers-by, and made appeal- 
ing- little noises in their throats, Avhich sounded 
rather greedy. A very little attention, we felt, if 
tactfully paid, would have made friends of them 
for life. 
BOXING DAY IN LONDON. 
The following figures show the attendances 
at various resorts in London : — ■ 
Zoological Gardens 
Kew Gardens 
British Museum ... 
Science Museum, South Kensington. 
3,854 
3,000 
2,797 
2,615 
JAMRACH'S. 
(Continued from No. 8.) 
Passing from the back of this little room, we 
enter a very large one, extending from the front 
to* the back of the entire premises, with a gallery 
on three sidesi above. Here we are joined by the 
younger Mr. Jamrach, and here we stand amid the 
most bewildering multitude of bric-a-brac and 
quaint valuables ever jumbled together : fantastic 
gods and godesses, strange arms and armour, 
wonderful carvings in ivory, and pricelessi gems, 
of old Japanese pottery. Merely to enumerate in 
the baldest way a tenth part of these things would 
fill this paper, and briefly to describe a hundredth 
part would fill the Magazine. And when we ex- 
press our wonder at the extent of the collection, 
we are calmly informed that this is only a part- — 
there are more about the building — four or five 
roomfuls or so' ! 
We have come to St. George's Street expect- 
ing "toi see nothing but a zoological warehouse, 
and all this is a surprise. That such a store as we 
now see were hidden away in Shadwell would have 
seemed highly improbable, and indeed we are 
told that very few people are aware of its exist- 
ence. "The museums know us, however," says 
Mr. Jamrach the younger, "and many of their 
chicf treasures have come from this place." Among 
the few curious visitors who have found their way 
to Jamrach 's there has been the Prince of Wales, 
who stayed long, and left much surprised, and 
pleased at all he had seen. The late Frank Buck- 
land, too, whose whole-souled passion for natural 
history took him to this establishment day after 
day, often for all day, could rarely resist the fas- 
cination of the museum, even while his beloved 
animals growled in the adjacent lairs. The Jam- 
rach 's do not push the sale of this bric-a-brac, and 
seem to love to keep the strange things about 
them.. Their trade is in animals, and their deal- 
ing's in arms and curiosities form almost a hobby. 
Many of the beautiful pieces of pottery have stood 
here thirty years, and their proud possessors seem 
in no great anxiety to part with them, now. A 
natural love of the quaint and beautiful first led 
Mr. Jamrach to buy carvings and shells from the 
sea-faring men who brought him his birds and 
monkeys, so that these men soon were led to re- 
gard his warehouse as the regulation place of dis- 
posal for any new or old thing- from across the 
seas; and so sprang up this overflowing museum. 
Among hundreds of idols we are shown three 
which are especially noteworthy. The first is a 
splendid life-sized Buddha — a work of surprising- 
grace and art. The god is represented as sitting, 
his back being screened by a great shell of the 
purest design. The whole thing is heavily gilt, 
and is set, in places, with jewels. Every line is a 
line of grace, and the features, while of a distinct 
Hindoo cast, beam with a most refined mildness. 
What monetary value Mr. Jamrach sets on this 
we do 1 not dare to ask; and, indeed, we are now 
placed before the second of the three — a Vishnu 
carved in alto-relievo of some hard black wood. 
This is a piece of early Indian art, and it has a 
history. It was fished up some twenty years ago 
from the bottom of the River Krishna, where it 
had been reverently deposited by its priests to 
save it from insult and mutilation at the hands of 
the invading Mohammedan; and there it had lain 
for eight hundred years. It is undamaged, with 
the exception that the two more prominent of the 
four arms are broken off; and that it has escaped 
the insult which its devout priests feared is testi- 
fied by the fact that the nose — straight, delicate, 
and almost European in shape — has not been 
broken. It is an extremely rare thing for a 
Vishnu free from this desecration — a fatal one in 
the eyes of worshippers — to be seen in this coun- 
try. Above the head are carved medallions repre- 
senting the ten incarnations of the god, for the 
last of which mighty avatars millions still devoutly 
wait in mystic India; while here, in Ratcliff High- 
way, after, all its dark adventures, and after its 
eight centuries of immersion below the Krishna, 
stands the embodiment of the god himself, mildly 
serene and meekly dignified. 
The third of these gods is quite a different 
person. There is nothing- resembling beauty — 
