For the life of animals in the primeval forest is, as one glance would show you, principally arboreal.

The flowers, the birds, the insects, are all a hundred feet over your head as you walk along in the all but lifeless shade; and half an hour therein would make you feel how true was Mr.Wallace's simile--that a walk in the tropic forest was like one in an empty cathedral while the service was being celebrated upon the roof.
In the next two cages, however, are animals who need no prehensile tails; for they are cats, furnished with those far more useful and potent engines, retractile claws; a form of beast at which the thoughtful man will never look without wonder; so unique, so strange, and yet as perfect, that it suits every circumstance of every clime; as does that equally unique form the dragon-fly.

We found the dragon-flies here, to our surprise, exactly similar to, and as abundant as, the dragon-flies at home, and remembering that there were dragon-flies of exactly the same type ages and ages ago, in the days of the OEningen and Solenhofen slates, said--Here is indeed a perfect work of God, which, as far as man can see, has needed no improvement (if such an expression be allowable) throughout epochs in which the whole shape of continents and seas, and the whole climate of the planet, has changed again and again.

The cats are: an ocelot, a beautiful spotted and striped fiend, who hisses like a snake; a young jaguar, a clumsy, happy kitten, about as big as a pug dog, with a puny kitten's tail, who plays with the spider monkey, and only shows by the fast-increasing bulk of his square lumbering head, that in six months he will be ready to eat the monkey, and in twelve to eat the keeper.
There are strange birds, too.

One, whom you may see in the Zoological Gardens, like a plover with a straight beak and bittern's plumage, from 'The Main,' whose business is to walk about the table at meals uttering sad metallic noises and catching flies.