examination, and then the visitor will have closed his inspection of the museum specimens of birds.  These four cases contain, however, one or two birds, the habits of which are singular.  First, there are the Pelicans with their capacious pouches.  The rapidity with which these birds swallow small fish has been witnessed by most people at our Zoological Gardens.  The visitor should notice next, the European Gannet, of which strange stories of strength and prowess are related.  The velocity with which they dive in search of food has been variously estimated.  It is said that on the coast of Scotland, fishermen have found them entangled in their nets at the extraordinary depth of a hundred and twenty feet below the surface.  Pennant relates a story of a bird, which, on seeing some pilchards lying upon a floating plank, darted down with such strength, that its bill pierced the board.  And now the visitor should turn to contemplate the grand and solitary Frigate Bird.  This bird appears to have the power of sustaining itself in the air for an indefinite period, and to wander with the utmost confidence on its broad pinions, over hundreds of miles of ocean, now and then dipping to secure its prey.  This slim, pale, and solitary wanderer must have a noble appearance, when calmly sailing upon its great expanse of wing, a thousand miles from any resting-place, its food floating in the element below, to be taken at will.  Before leaving the last, or most northerly apartment of the eastern zoological gallery, the visitor would do well to notice a few of the pictures which are suspended above the wall cases.  Here are portraits of Voltaire; the hardy Sir Francis Drake; Cosmo de Medici and his secretary (a copy from Titian); Martin Luther; Jean Rousseau; Captain William Dampier, by Murray; Giorgioni’s Ulysses Aldrovandus; Sir Peter Paul Kubens; the inventor of moveable type, John Guttenberg (which would be more appropriately placed in the library); John Locke; a poor woman, named Mary Davis, who in the seventeenth century, was celebrated for an excrescence which grew upon her head, and finally parted into two horns; the great Algernon Sidney; Pope; Ramsay’s portrait of the celebrated Earl of Chesterfield, who, according to Dr. Johnson, “taught the morality of a profligate, and the manners of a dancing master,” and a landscape by Wilson.  At the northern door of this gallery are, a painting of Stonehenge, and one of the cromlech at Plas Newydd, in Anglesea.

The visitor’s way now lies to the west out of the eastern zoological gallery into the most southerly of the two northern galleries.  This gallery, which consists of five compartments, or rooms, is called

The northern zoological gallery.