(48h %) 
BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF 
SCIENCE, DUNDEE, 1912. 
ADDRESS TO THE ZOOLOGICAL SECTION. 
By P. Cuatmers Mitcuett, D.Sc., F.R.S., President of the Section. 
ZooLoGicAL GARDENS AND THE PRESERVATION OF FAUNA. 
(Concluded from p. 398.) 
AND now I come to the last side of my subject, that of Zoological 
Gardens, with which I have been specially connected in the last ten 
years. My friend M. Gustave Loisel, in his recently issued monu- 
mental ‘ Histoire des Ménageries,’ has shown that in the oldest civi- 
lisations of which we have record, thousands of years before the 
Christian Era, wild animals were kept in captivity. He is inclined 
to trace the origin of the custom to a kind of totemism. Amongst 
the ancient Egyptians, for instance, besides the bull and the serpent, 
baboons, hippopotami, cats, lions, wolves, ichneumons, shrews, wild 
goats and wild sheep, and of lower animals, crocodiles, various fishes 
and beetles were held sacred in different towns. These animals were 
protected, and even the involuntary killing of any of them was 
punished by the death of the slayer, but besides this general pro- 
tection, the priests selected individuals which they recognised by 
infallible signs as being the divine animals, and tamed, guarded, and 
fed in the sacred buildings, whilst the revenues derived from certain 
tracts of land were set apart for their support. The Egyptians were 
also famous hunters, and kept and tamed various wild animals, in- 
cluding cheetahs, striped hyznas, leopards, and even lions, which 
they used in stalking their prey. The tame lions were sometimes 
clipped, as in ancient Assyria, and used both in the chase and in war. 
The rich Egyptians of Memphis had large parks in which they kept 
not only the domestic animals we now know, but troops of gazelles, 
antelopes, and cranes, which were certainly tame, and were herded 
by keepers with wands. So also in China at least fifteen centuries 
before our era, wild animals were captured in the far north by the 
orders of the Empergr, and were kept in the Royal Parks. A few 
centuries later the Emperor Wen-Wang established a zoological 
collection between Pekin and Nankin, his design being partly educa- 
tional, as it was called the Park of Intelligence. In the valley of the 
Euphrates, centuries before the time of Moses, there were lists of 
sacred animals, and records of the keeping in captivity of apes, 
elephants, rhinoceroses, camels and dromedaries, gazelles and ante- 
lopes, and it may well be that the legend of the Garden of Eden is a 
memory of the Royal Menagerie of some ancient king. The Greeks, 
whose richest men had none of the wealth of the Egyptians or of the 
princes of the Kast, do not appear to have kept many wild animals, 
