LONDON BEARS 
205 
sit at table with a pair of black bears, each adorned 
with a silver collar, seated in a large arm-chair on 
either side of him. An old Devonshire woman, who 
had been a servant in his family, took the bears under 
her charge, and fed them daily, until one of them 
bit three of the fingers off her hand. This was too 
much even for her master’s partiality for his pets, 
and the bears were slaughtered, and their bodies duly 
boiled down into “ bears’ grease,” under the super- 
intendence of their former owner and the attached 
domestic, who, though approving of the measure, like 
John Gilpin’s wife, “ had still a frugal mind,” and felt 
that the unexpected supply of an expensive cosmetic 
should not be wasted. 
The Polar bears are perhaps, with the exception of 
the elephants and other great pachyderms, the longest 
lived of animals when in captivity. In 1880 the first 
of the Polar bears died, after spending thirty-four years 
in Regent’s Park, and the eldest of the pair now in the 
collection has already spent twenty-six years in the 
Zoo. This is a splendid animal ; at a rough guess it 
must weigh nearly a ton, and no carnivorous creature 
approaches it in size and strength. When we 
recollect that its common prey is the walrus, a sea 
beast nearly as large as a rhinoceros, seldom moving 
far from the edge of the ice-floes, and able by mere 
weight to drag both itself and its enemy into the sea, 
and to fight for life in its native element, the strength 
and armament of teeth and claws necessary to destroy 
it must be greater even than those of the lion, which, 
