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.

There are strange birds, too. One, whom you may see in the
Zoological Gardens, like a plover with a straight beak and bittern's
plumage, from 'The Main,' whose business is to walk about the table
at meals uttering sad metallic noises and catching flies. His name
is Sun-bird, {93a} 'Sun-fowlo' of the Surinam Negroes, according to
dear old Stedman, 'because, when it extends its wings, which it
often does, there appears on the interior part of each wing a most
beautiful representation of the sun. This bird,' he continues very
truly, 'might be styled the perpetual motion, its body making a
continual movement, and its tail keeping time like the pendulum of a
clock.' {93b} A game-bird, olive, with a bare red throat, also from
The Main, called a Chacaracha, {93c} who is impudently brave, and
considers the house his own; and a great black Curassow, {93d} also
from The Main, who patronises the turkeys and guinea-fowl; stalks in
dignity before them; and when they do not obey, enforces his
authority by pecking them to death. There is thus plenty of
amusement here, and instruction too, for those to whom the ways of
dumb animals during life are more interesting than their stuffe