[2] Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India,
    vol. i. 4to., 1828.

We may here in connexion with the Zoological Gardens, not inappropriately introduce the following graphic passage from the concluding Number of Mr. Landseer’s “Characteristic Sketches of Animals.”  It appears as a “Note by the Editor,” Mr. John Barrow, and represents the labours of the Zoological Society as very gratifying to the subscribers and the public.[3]

    [3] We are indebted to the Literary Gazette of Saturday last
    for early cognizance of this extract.

“By the spirit and perseverance with which they have succeeded in domiciling their magnificent collection of living animals in the Regent’s Park—­by the knowledge and experience they have evinced in the arrangements adopted in that establishment, and the good taste, skill, and industry, they have employed in carrying into effect its multiplied details—­they have accomplished a task of far higher importance, and of infinitely nobler character, than that of merely providing for all classes of an enlightened metropolis an additional source of amusement and recreation.  Such a collection, so maintained and so displayed, advances—­slowly but certainly—­the best interests of morals and philosophy.  The curiosity which it excites, the gratification it affords, operate, though with differing degrees of intensity, on the most uncultivated and the best informed of those who visit it, to beget inquiry and awaken reflection; and in what can inquiry and reflection, thus originated, determine, but in producing or extending the most sublime impressions of the beneficence, the power, and the providence, of the Great Author of Creation?  The physical mechanism of birds, the muscular energies of brutes, strike us at first with wonder, or move us with mingled terror and delight; but the activity of the human mind will not suffer us long to remain at this point of simple excitement.  We involuntarily begin to analyze the properties of animals, the relations of their structure to those properties, the adaptation of the parts to the whole of that structure, and the conformity of their physical endowment and their instincts to the various habitats or regions in which they respectively exist.  Whether we reason from causes to effects, as from instinct to habit; or endeavour, upon an inverted process, to arrive from the consideration of effects at causes, as from habit to instinct; or attempt, upon the analysis and analogies of admitted facts in the natural history of one animal, to deduce a theory of the history of another,—­we shall find this mysterious but beautiful chain of relation and adaptation unbroken, impassable, perpetual.

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