of a face, is really extraordinary. There is
surely no one who can look at the seal in these
gardens without almost a feeling of regard.
The expression of its eyes is more intelligent
and beautiful than that of any other creature—
not excepting the elephant even—in the whole
collection; and its action, as it hops along after
its keeper and follows him when he leaves its
enclosure with its eyes, is quite touching in its
helplessness.

But it is time to get to the Salamander.
The sea-anemones, the discontented-looking
fresh-water fish, the little dapper water-fowl,
and a hundred other attractive subjects on
which to moralise and speculate, must be left
undiscussed. There is no time even to
inquire, why it is that the Polar bear amuses
himself by walking backwards, and waving
his head from side to side as he looks up to
the sky. There is no time to notice the little
shy agouti who runs out of his hole as you
approach his cage, and hastens down his little
front garden to see who you are, and who, finding
you are not the man he expected, trots back
again as fast as he came out. There is no time
for anything but the Salamander and the whale-
headed storks. And first, the Salamander.

What does the world expect a Salamander to
be like? What did your Eye-witness anticipate
when he hurried off to inspect this creature?
Did he imagine that he should find an enormous
furnace roaring and blazing in a cage of red-hot
bars, and that, standing aloof from this, and
peering into the hottest and most central portion
of the flame, he would there behold an
enormous Red Monster distantly resembling the
griffin of heraldry lifting its spined and bat-
like wings, and flapping them in burning joy
over its head? If perfect candour is to
characterise the communications of the E.-W.,
he must own that there was some such thing
in his thoughts. The vile ancients are to
blame for this. They have described a creature
“that is bred from heat, that lives in the flames,
and feeds upon fire as its proper nourishment.
As they saw every other element, the air, the
earth, and the water, inhabited, fancy was set to
work to find or make an inhabitant in fire, and
thus to people every part of nature.” Those
wretched ancients! As if an element could be
inhabited that is only occasionally existent.
What becomes of the animal whose natural
element is fire, when the fire is extinguished.
Does a new Salamander spring into existence
every time a fire is lighted, and what becomes
of the familiar Salamander of your Eye-witness
when Thirza, the housemaid, lets his bedroom
fire out. These same ancients (whom, by-the-by,
everything proves to have been arrant liars)
have called the Salamander “the daughter of
fire, giving it, however, a body of ice.” This was
the Salamander of the ancients, of the classics,
and (if the truth must be told), of the Eye-witness.

Let us turn from it to the Salamander of the
nineteenth century, and of the Zoological
Gardens. A tank in a dark corner is substituted
for the cage with the red-hot bars, while the
furnace is represented by an element which,
however satisfactory in itself, is something of a
surprise when you have expected a fire—in a
word, the tank is full of water!

It is full also of eels: of little eels and trumpery
minnows, or small gudgeons, which are
swimming about, apparently in discomfort, for
they keep very near the surface, and some of
them are turning up their little white stomachs
in the agonies of death. This was all that your
servant saw, except that in the darkest corner
of the tank, and under a ledge, there appeared
to be a sort of eft, or lizard, of enormous size,
brown, bloated, and hideous.

Your Eye-witness was on the point of deserting
the tank, as a thing which did not concern
him, when the words “Gigantic Salamander,”
at the head of a printed paper affixed to it,
arrested his attention, and caused him once
more to examine the contents of the cistern
with still greater scrutiny. Unable to make
out anything more than he had seen at first,
your servant was coming to the conclusion
that the Salamander had blazed himself out
of the gardens altogether, leaving his descriptive
notice behind him, when a sudden thought
struck him, and struck him so hard that it
almost took his breath away. “Perhaps it's the
eft?” said the Eye-witness.

Everything went to prove it was so. The
fact that the animal was in the water when it
ought to have been in the fire; that it had
secreted itself, as every exhibited animal does,
in the most inscrutable part of its den; that it
refused to give any token of life whatever; that
it was in no respect what it was expected to
be—all these things were convincing proofs
that the bloated and abhorrent eft was what,
the printed paper announced as the Gigantic
Salamander, the Sieboldia maxima of Japan.

“This animal,” the descriptive notice goes on
to say, “is the largest specimen of the true
amphibious known to exist. . . . It is the nearest
living analogue of the fossil salamander of the
tertiary fresh-water formation of (Eningen,
described by Scheuchzer as a fossil man (Homo
diluvii testis), and since called Andreas Scheuchzeri.”

Against the earlier and more scientific portion
of this description, your servant has nothing
to say. He has no objection to make to the
announcement that this noisome animal is of “the
tertiary fresh-water formation of Œningen,”
because he has not the remotest idea what that is.
To all this sort of thing he is ready to agree;
but against the notion of the “fossil man” as a
term under any circumstances applicable to this
huge and bloated eft, he desires to take instant
and indignant exception.

The fossil man of our Andrew is a creature
about two feet in its extreme length from the
end of its most appalling snout to the extremity
of its hideous tail. It is a crawling dragon;
an exaggerated eft; a pestiferous and appalling
lizard; a soft and dwarfish crocodile.
What is it not, that is unclean and fearful?