10 
THE ZOO IN A FROST 
drowsy brain was insensible to the warnings of physical 
malaise. 
Winter in the Insect House is the time of incubation 
and sleep. All the beautiful forms of tropical moths 
and insects, which burst into life in the butterfly form 
in May, are sleeping in their pitcher-shaped cocoons, 
or buried in moss and mould. Only the great Goliath 
beetle, with a body' like a well-blacked boot on which 
cream has been spilt, and immense stag-like horns, 
was alternately eating melon and sipping highly- 
sweetened tea, two indigestible forms of food on which 
it had made an almost uninterrupted meal for seven 
weeks. 
From another point of view the demeanour of the 
semi-tropical birds in this sudden wave of cold was 
even more interesting than the power of adaptation to 
climate shown by so many quadrupeds. The whole 
pheasant tribe, perhaps the most beautiful, as a class, 
of any family of birds, are in the acme of plumage and 
condition. The Himalayas and China are the main 
homes of these gorgeous creatures, and we are not 
surprised to see in Regent’s Park the metallic lustre of 
the Monauls, or the scarlet, orange, and gold of the 
rarer Chinese varieties, in equal perfection with that 
attained in the glens of Nepaul, or the mountains of 
Pekin. But the iVrgus pheasant is a native of Sumatra 
and Borneo, the companion of the trogons and the 
ourang-outang ; yet the cock-bird was displaying its 
beauties in the open air, among leaves and grass tipped 
with hoar-frost, and showed plumage so close and 
