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

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Meantime it would be a charming amusement to any one who desires a new and not too exacting intellectual interest in a visit to the Zoological Gardens, to go from the aviaries to the wild-fowl ponds, and from the pheasants in their runs to the finches in their cages in the Parrot House, and make a complete list of the possessors of each form of these distinct and arbitrary animal patterns. By so doing, he would incidentally secure an acquaintance with the most beautiful of all the birds, for the possessors of these ornaments are generally among the most elaborately marked of any of their species. The list given above is far from exhaustive, and as the first, and often the most pleasing, part of these minor inquiries into nature consists in the collection and classifying of likenesses, it offers an attraction as great as any obvious inducements to observation in the Society’s collection. Some day we shall perhaps see in the cases at South Kensington a collection of examples of the repetition of ornament, as well as of the evolution of ornament in nature. The origin of the first is now explained. But on what hypothesis can we account for the second?