The young elephant has increased immensely, since last year, in stature and girth.  He is remarkably neat in his person, wisping himself all over with hay for hours at a time.  Whether he does this for cleanliness or to obtain a flavor of elephant for the hay is doubtful, however, for he always eats it after having made use of it as a flesh-brush for a good while.  Notices requesting visitors “not to feed or annoy the animals” are posted on the compartments.  In the case of the elephant, though, it might be as well also to caution persons against making jokes about his trunk—­a low kind of ribaldry in which every carpet-bagger, who never had one, seems to think himself bound to indulge.

There is a cinnamon bear in one of the outside cages, whose claws remind one sharply that cinnamon and cloves go together, and that clove is a tense of the verb “to cleave.”  But we do not want such a fellow as that to cleave to us, since it is evident that a grocer kind of brute than a cinnamon bear cannot be found in all the ursine family.  “Sugar and spice, and all things nice,” are stated in song to be the materials that “little girls are made of,” but if we thought that cinnamon bear figured upon the list of groceries thus used for modelling young maidens, we would either fly to the desert with Dr. MARY WALKER or immure ourselves in a nunnery with SUSAN B. ANTHONY, and all the other females of the anti-sugar-and-spice persuasion.

Fattest of all the beasts in the Central Park collection is the larger of the two grizzly bears.  From the easy way in which he takes life, he reminds one of a successful politician, who had worked his way up from being a slim and impecunious “repeater” to the position of Alderman, or Custom House official, and President of the Fat Men’s Club.  There is a drunken leer in this beast’s eye, an inebriate roll in all his movements, that lead one mechanically to peer into the darkness of his den with the view of seeing what the Bar fixings are like.  It would be a rare freak to treat the huge fellow to a cask of rum and sugar, and then stand by with a comic artist, and take down for PUNCHINELLO the traits of BRUIN the Grizzly on a “bender,” and with all his repressed nature brought out by the strong drink.

“Carnivorium” is the word now properly applied by the Park authorities to the establishment in which the wild beasts are kept.  That is, the term will be correct when applied only to the particular department allotted to the fierce flesh-devouring animals.  At present camels are accommodated in the Carnivorium, and so are cows, which is a sort of slur upon the habits of these poor innocent vegetarians.  The new word, however, is likely to find considerable extension, and if any provider for the public maw should choose hereafter to call his dining-saloon a Carnivorium, none would have a right to cavil at him on philological grounds, at least.