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tal, which he mistook for a piece of money. The cries of this poor being were heard distinctly during the stillness of the night by those who dwelt within the garden; but, as there was no reason to dread the possibility of such an accident occurring, no assistance was offered. He was found by the guard who came to relieve him in the morning, lying dead beneath the paws of the bear, exhibiting, comparatively speaking, few marks of external violence, but almost all his bones broken to pieces. The bear retired at the voice of his keeper, and did not, in fact, seem to have been induced by any carnivorous propensity to attack the person whose death it had thus so miserably occasioned. It was rather what an old man in the garden characterized as a piece of mauvaise plaisanterie, for it appeared to derive amusement from lifting the body in its paws and rolling it along the ground, and shewed no symptom of fierceness or anger when driven into its interior cell.^[1]

Turning to the right as you enter the lower gate of the Garden, opposite the Bridge of Austerlitz, now called the Pons du Jardin du Roi, you approach the dwellings of the more carnivorous animals, which are confined in cages with iron gratings, very similar to our travelling caravans. Here the lion is truly the king of beasts, being the oldest, the largest, and in all respects the most magnificent, I have ever seen. There is a melancholy grandeur about this creature in a state of captivity, which I can never witness without the truest commiseration.—The elegant and playful attitudes of the smaller animals of the feline tribe being so expressive of happiness and contentment, prevent one from compassionating their misfortunes in a similar manner; while the fierce and cruel eye of the tiger, with his restless and impatient demeanour, produces rather the contrary feeling of satisfaction, that so savage an animal should be kept for ever in confinement. He appears to lament his loss of liberty, chiefly because he cannot satiate his thirst for blood by the sacrifice of those before him; his countenance glares as fiercely, and his breath comes as hot, as if he still couched among the burned-up grass of an Indian jungle. But his companion in adversity appears to suffer from a more kingly sorrow—the remembrance of his ancient woods and rivers, with all their wild magnificence, "dingle and bushy dell," is visibly implanted in his recollection. Like the dying gladiator, he thinks only of "his young barbarians," and, when he paces around his cell, he does so with the same air of forlorn dignity as Regulus might have assumed in the prison of the Carthaginians.

But, while we are indulging ourselves in "a world of fond remembrances," we are forgetting Mr Royer's book, to which we had sat down with the intention of extracting an article. We shall therefore proceed in the first place to form a compendious sketch of the Garden and Cabinet, from the period of their origin to the close of last century, which we deem it the more necessary to do, as the subject has not yet found a place in English literature. We must, however, premise, that the nature and confined limits of our abstract will necessarily exclude a thousand interesting particulars regarding the history of individual plants and animals, for the elucidation of which we therefore refer our readers to the work itself, which is just about this time ready for delivery to the public.

The King's Garden in Paris, commonly called the Garden of Plants, was founded by Louis XIII., by an edict given and registered by the Parliament, in the month of May, 1635. Its direction was assigned to the first Physician Herouard, who chose as Intendant Guy de la Brosse. At first it consisted only of a single house, and twenty-four acres of land. Guy de la Brosse, during the first year of his management, formed a parterre 292 feet long, and 227 broad, composed of such plants as he could procure, the greater number of which were given him by John Robin, the father of Vespasian, the King's botanist. These amounted, including varieties, to 1800. He then prepared the ground, procured new plants by correspondence, tra-