e habits of Hindostan or China. The modern
menagerie of Lucknow is the only considerable native effort in those
parts with which I am acquainted.

[Egypt.]--The mutilated statistical tablet of Karnak (_Trans. R. Soc.
Lit._, 1847, p. 369, and 1863, p. 65) refers to an armed invasion of
Armenia by Thothmes III., and the payment of a large tribute of
antelopes and birds. When Ptolemy Philadelphus feted the
Alexandrians (_Athenoeus_, v.), the Ethiopians brought dogs,
buffaloes, bears, leopards, lynxes, a giraffe, and a rhinoceros.
Doubtless this description of gifts was common. Live beasts are the
one article of curiosity and amusement that barbarians can offer to
civilised nations.

[Assyria.]--Mr. Fox Talbot thus translates (_Journal Asiatic Soc._,
xix. 124) part of the inscription on the black obelisk of Ashurakbal
found in Nineveh and now in the British Museum:--

"He caught in hunter's toils (a blank number) of armi, turakhi, nali,
and yadi. Every one of these animals he placed in separate enclosures.
He brought up their young ones and counted them as carefully as
young lambs. As to the creatures called burkish, utrati (dromedaries?),
tishani, and dagari, he wrote for them and they came. The
dromedaries he kept in enclosures, where he brought up their young
ones. He entrusted each kind of animal to men of their own country to
tend them. There were also curious animals of the Mediterranean Sea,
which the King of Egypt sent as a gift and entrusted to the care of
men of their own land. The very choicest animals were there in
abundance, and birds of heaven with beautiful wings. It was a
splendid menagerie, and all the work of his own hands. The names of
the animals were placed beside them."

[Rome.]--The extravagant demands for the amphitheatre of ancient
Rome must have stimulated the capture of wild animals in Asia, Africa,
and the then wild parts of Europe, to an extraordinary extent. I
will quote one instance from Gibbon:--

"By the order of Probus, a vast quantity of large trees torn up by
the roots were transplanted into the midst of the circus. The
spacious and shady forest was immediately filled with a thousand
ostriches, a thousand stags, a thousand fallow-deer, and a thousand
wild boars, and all this variety of game was abandoned to the
riotous impetuosity of the multitude. The tragedy of the succeeding
day consisted in the massacre of a hundred lions, an equal number of
lionesses, two hundred leopards, and