he feeds himself with it in the forest it is difficult to guess:  and when he hops up and down on his great clattering feet—­two toes turned forward, and two back—­twisting head and beak right and left (for he cannot see well straight before him) to see whence the bananas are coming; or when again, after gorging a couple, he sits gulping and winking, digesting them in serene satisfaction, he is as good a specimen as can be seen of the ludicrous—­dare I say the intentionally ludicrous?—­element in nature.

Next to him is a Kinkajou; {91a} a beautiful little furry bear—­or racoon—­who has found it necessary for his welfare in this world of trees to grow a long prehensile tail, as the monkeys of the New World have done.  He sleeps by day; save when woke up to eat a banana, or to scoop the inside out of an egg with his long lithe tongue:  but by night he remembers his forest-life, and performs strange dances by the hour together, availing himself not only of his tail, which he uses just as the spider monkey does, but of his hind feet, which he can turn completely round at will, till the claws point forward like those of a bat.  But with him, too, the tail is the sheet-anchor, by which he can hold on, and bring all his four feet to bear on his food.  So it is with the little Ant-eater, {91b} who must needs climb here to feed on the tree ants.  So it is, too, with the Tree Porcupine, {91c} or Coendou, who (in strange contrast to the well-known classic Porcupine of the rocks of Southern Europe) climbs trees after leaves, and swings about like the monkeys.  For the life of animals in the primeval forest is, as one glance would show you, principally arboreal.  The flowers, the birds, the insects, are all a hundred feet over your head as you walk along in the all but lifeless shade; and half an hour therein would make you feel how true was Mr. Wallace’s simile—­that a walk in the tropic forest was like one in an empty cathedral while the service was being celebrated upon the roof.

In the next two cages, however, are animals who need no prehensile tails; for they are cats, furnished with those far more useful and potent engines, retractile claws; a form of beast at which the thoughtful man will never look without wonder; so unique, so strange, and yet as perfect, that it suits every circumstance of every clime; as does that equally unique form the dragon-fly.  We found the dragon-flies here, to our surprise, exactly similar to, and as abundant as, the dragon-flies at home, and remembering that there were dragon-flies of exactly the same type ages and ages ago, in the days of the OEningen and Solenhofen slates, said—­Here is indeed a perfect work of God, which, as far as man can see, has needed no improvement (if such an expression be allowable) throughout epochs in which the whole shape of continents and seas, and the whole climate of the planet, has changed again and again.  The cats are:  an ocelot, a beautiful spotted and striped fiend, who hisses like a snake; a young jaguar, a clumsy, happy kitten, about as big as a pug dog, with a puny kitten’s tail, who plays with the spider monkey, and only shows by the fast-increasing bulk of his square lumbering head, that in six months he will be ready to eat the monkey, and in twelve to eat the keeper.