BRITISH ASSOCIATION;: ZOOLOGICAL SECTION. 483 
dispose of, he must send them to the best market, for dealing in wild 
animals is a risky branch of commerce. If he send them to this 
country, there are very few possible buyers, and it often happens that 
he is unable to find a purchaser. If he send them to Germany, one 
or other of the twenty Gardens is almost certain to absorb them, and 
failing Germany, Belgium and Holland are near at hand. Were there 
twenty prosperous Zoological Gardens in Great Britain, they could 
be better stocked, at cheaper rates, than those we have now. The 
second practical reason is that it is a great advantage to menageries 
to have easy opportunities of lending and exchanging animals ; for it 
often happens that as a result of successful breeding or of gifts on the 
one hand, or of deaths on the other, a particular institution is over- 
stocked with one species or deficient in another. 
One of the ideas strongly in the minds of those who founded the 
earlier of the modern Zoological Gardens was the introduction and 
acclimatisation of exotic animals that might have an economic value. 
It is curious how completely this idea has been abandoned and how 
infertile it has proved. The living world would seem to offer an 
almost unlimited range of creatures which might be turned to the 
profit of man and as domesticated animals supply some of his wants. 
And yet I do not know of any important addition to domesticated 
animals since the remotest antiquity. A few birds for the coverts, 
fancy water-fowl for ponds and lakes, and brightly plumaged birds 
for cages or for aviaries have been introduced, chiefly through zoo- 
logical societies, but we must seek other reasons for their existence 
than these exiguous gains. 
Menageries are useful in the first place as educational. institu- 
tions, in the widest sense of the word. Every new generation should 
have an opportunity of seeing the wonder and variety of animated 
nature, and of learning something that they cannot acquire from 
books or pictures or lectures about the chief types of wild animals. 
For that reason Zoological Gardens should be associated in some 
form with elementary and secondary education. We in London 
admit the children from elementary schools on five mornings in the 
week at the nominal charge of a penny for each child, and in co- 
operation with the Educational Committee of the London County 
Council, we conduct courses of lectures and demonstrations for the 
teachers who will afterwards bring their children to visit the Gardens. 
Menageries provide one of the best schools for students of art, for 
nowhere else than amongst living animals are to be found such 
strange fantasies of colour, such play of light on contour and surface, 
such intricate and beautiful harmonies of function and structure. To 
encourage art the London Society allows students of recognised 
schools of drawing and painting, modelling and designing, to use the 
Gardens at nominal rates. 
Menageries provide a rich material for the anatomist, histologist, 
physiologist, parasitologist, and pathologist. It is surprising to note 
how many of the animals used by Lamarck and Cuvier, Johannes 
Miller and Wiedersheim, Owen and Huxley, were obtained from 
Zoological Gardens. At all the more important Gardens increasing 
Gool. 4th ser, vol. XVI., November, 1912. 21 
