s kangaroo of New Holland is a fellow-lodger
with the ferocious gnu of Southern Africa; and the patient llama, who
has left the snowy sides and precipitous defiles of the Andes,
contemplates without terror its formidable neighbours, the wolf of the
Pyrenees, and the bear of the stupendous mountains of Thibet. In the
immediate vicinity of the sacred bull, whose consecrated life has
heretofore been passed in luxurious freedom or insolent enjoyment on the
banks of the Ganges or the Jumna--feeds the gaunt and shaggy bison,
which crops with sullen tranquillity a herbage more nutritious but less
grateful to him than he loved to cull among the stony pastures of the
Alleghany range, or of the howling solitudes surrounding Hudson's Bay.
Though thousands of leagues have interposed between the arid sands from
which they have been imported into this peaceful and common home, the
camel of the Thebais, as he ruminates in his grassy _parterre_, surveys
with composed surprise the wild dog of the Tierra del Fuego and the
sharp-eyed dingo of Australia. Around the ghastly sloth-bear,
disentombed from his burrows in the gloomiest woods of Mysore or
Canara--and his more lively congener of Russia--the armadillo of Brazil
and the pine marten of Norway display a vivacity of action and a
cheerfulness of gesture which captivity seems powerless to repress. The
elephant of Ceylon, and the noble wapiti of the Canadas, repose beneath
the same roof; and from his bath, or his pavilion, the Arctic bear
contemplates--not his native rocks and solitudes, the crashing of
icebergs, and the Polar seas, alternately lashed into terrific fury or
hemmed in by accumulating precipices of ice; but--monkeys of almost
every size, form, and family, which gambol in the woods of Numidia or
Gundwana; in the loftiest trees of Sumatra; on the mountains of Java; by
the rivers of Paraguay and Hindustan; of South America and South Asia;
among the jungly banks of the Godavery and the woody shores of the
Pamoni, of the Oroonoko, and the Bramahputra--in short, in every sunny
clime and region where the rigours of his own winter are not only
unknown, but inconceivable. There is something sublime in the mere
consideration of the prodigious remoteness from one another of the
various points from which these animals have thus been collected;
something gratifying to human pride, in the thought that neither the
freezing atmosphere of the countries which surround the Pole, nor the
fierce