AESTHETICS AT THE ZOO 
114 
ful “ deep-sea mission ” to the mermaids of the North. 
It would be interesting to make some musical ex- 
periments at the Zoological Gardens ; but the first 
occasion on which the writer attempted this, led to 
such strong suspicion of his insanity among the 
visitors, that in the face of a caution addressed by an 
elderly nurse to her charges, “ Don’t go near ’im — he 
ain’t right in his ’ead,” he had not the courage to 
continue his researches. 
Note. — In a letter to the writer, the late Dr. John Rae, F.R.S., 
the discoverer of the fate of the Franklin Expedition, urged that 
he should nevertheless make some trial of the effects of music on 
the different animals at the Zoo. Dr. Rae spent the days of his 
boyhood in the Orkney and Shetland Islands, and said that both 
there and in the regions round the frozen rim of the northern 
ocean, it was matter of common experience that the seals would 
follow a boat in which music was played. The following chapters 
give the interesting result of this suggestion. 
