rousers, sitting in a great chair as an Ethiopian
savage. This was the most cruel fraud I ever saw. The unnatural position
of the beast, and the damnable brutality of the woman-keeper, who sat
upon his knee, put her arm round his neck, called him husband and
sweetheart, and kissed him, made it the most disgusting spectacle I ever
witnessed. Cottle was with me."

He also tells of a fellow exhibiting a dragon-fly under a magnifier at a
country fair, and calling it the great High German "Heiter-Keiter."

THE POLAR BEAR.

(_Thalassarctos maritimus._[34])

Notwithstanding ice and snow, and the darkness of a nine months' winter,
the Arctic regions are tenanted by several mammalia. Some of these are
constant residents, the rest are migratory visitors. Of the former
division, one of the most conspicuous, as it is certainly the most
formidable, is the polar bear,--a creature between eight and nine feet
in length, which, shuffling along the snow at a very quick pace, and
being an excellent swimmer besides, cannot fail to inspire dread. The
large wide head and fearfully armed jaws are united by a strong neck to
powerful shoulders, from which spring the thick and muscular fore-legs.
The paws, both of the fore and of the hind feet, are broad and admirably
adapted, with their long hairy covering, to keep the polar bear from
sinking in the snow. Although the creature has an appearance of
clumsiness, it is the reverse of inactive. Every one who knows the
boundless spaces it has to traverse, when in a state of liberty and the
"monarch of all it surveys," cannot but pity it as a prisoner in the
Regent's Park, where a tolerably capacious den, supplied with a bath of
water of very limited dimension, affords the restless creature less
liberty than a squirrel has in its round-about, or a poor lark in its
cage.

Voyagers to the Arctic regions describe it as wandering over the fields
of ice, mounting the hummocks,[35] and looking around for prey. With
outstretched head, its little but keen eye directed to the various
points of a wide horizon, the polar bear looks out for seals; or scents
with its quick nostrils the luscious smell of some stinking
whale-blubber or half-putrid whale-flesh. Dr Scoresby relates[36] that a
piece of the _kreng_ of a whale thrown into the fire drew a bear to a
ship from the distance of miles. Captain Beechey mentions, that his
party in 1818, as they were off the coast of Spitzbergen, by setting on
fire some f