Читать книгу Life at the Zoo: Notes and Traditions of the Regent's Park Gardens онлайн

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“A couch of down, raised high on ebony,

Self-coloured, sombre, draped with sable pall,

Stands in the midst, whereon that god doth lie,

While all his limbs relaxed in slumber fall,”

wants but one touch to complete the drowsy theme—a sleeping lemur curled up on Somnus’ dusky pillow.

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A collection of tropical butterflies and moths reared in the Zoological Gardens was exhibited in the rooms of the Royal Society at their annual soirée in 1893. The fact that such perfect and beautiful examples of the frail and fantastic forms which by night fill the place taken by the humming-birds by day, in the steaming tropical forest, have lived in the precincts of a London park, is sufficient justification, if any be required, for their presence among such practical and progressive surroundings. Readers of Kenelm Chillingly, one of the latest and most extravagant of Bulwer Lytton’s romances, may remember that one of the airy fancies of his youthful and impossible heroine, is to keep pet butterflies in cages, and to shed floods of tears over their untimely death. They manage things better in the butterfly farm at the Zoo, where the brilliant insects, after their brief day is over, pass by a kind of metempsychosis from the catalogue of living to that of dead specimens, and figure anew in the list of “additions to the collections of the Society.”