I cannot leave the Botanical Garden without noting the pleasing effect of the light trellises which are a feature of all large gardens here. In this fine climate, where winter's cold is practically unknown, neither shrubs nor flowers need the protection of glass. An arbour of trellis-work with gay flower-borders forms a winter garden without glass, in which sun and shade, cunningly blended, throw into delicate relief the beauties of the plants. It is not quite the open air, and neither is it the greenhouse. Let us call it a vast cage of decorative vegetation.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The census of 1904 shows only twenty-nine thousand.
[2] The estuary, which is not a river, and which contains not a particle of silver, was thus named from a few native ornaments discovered in its bed by the first comers.
[CHAPTER III]
BUENOS AYRES (continued)
Botany and zoölogy are sister sciences. We leave the plants to inspect the beasts in the company of M. Thays, who is always glad to see his neighbour M. Onelli.
The governor of the Zoölogical Garden of Buenos Ayres is a phlegmatic little man, Franco-Italian in speech, and the more amusing in that his gay, caustic wit is clothed in a highly condensed, ironical form. What a pity that his animals, for whom he is father and mother, sister and brother, cannot appreciate his sallies! Not that it is by any means certain that they do not. It seems clear that they can enter into each other's feelings, if not thoughts, since an intimacy of the most touching kind exists between the man and inferior creation, to whose detriment the rights of biological priority have been reversed.