A. T.
THE JARDIN D'ACCLIMATATION OF PARIS.
This beautiful garden, one of the most attractive places in the world, was established in the Bois de Boulogne in 1860. It was in the most flourishing condition at the time of the breaking out of the war with Germany. That war nearly ruined it. During the siege elephants and other valuable animals were sacrificed for food. The carrier-pigeons that did such noble service during the siege were mostly raised in this establishment, and those that survived the war are kept there and most tenderly preserved. "Many died gloriously on the field of honor," as we read in the records of the society, which preserve a full account of their wonderful feats. Some of them again and again dared the Prussian lines, carrying those precious microscopic despatches photographed upon pellicles of collodion—so light that the whole one hundred and fifteen thousand received during the siege do not weigh over one gramme, a little over fifteen grains!
The great greenhouse of these gardens for plants that cannot endure a temperature lower than two degrees below zero centigrade (28.4° Fahr.) would enchant even the most indifferent observer. The building itself is one of the finest structures of its kind. It was once the property of the Lemichez Brothers, celebrated florists at Villiers, at which place it was known as the Palais des Flors. The Acclimatation Society purchased it in 1861, and every winter since then there has been a magnificent and unfailing display of flowers there. Masses of camellias, rhododendrons, azaleas, primroses, bruyères, pelargoniums constantly succeed each other. These are merely to delight the visitors, the great object of the hothouse being to nurse foreign plants and experiment with them. Among the rare ones are the paper-plant of the Aralia family; the Chamærops, or hemp-plant; the Phormium tenax, or New Zealand flax; and the Eucalyptus of Australia, that wonderful tree introduced lately into Algeria, where it grows six mètres a year, and yields more revenue than the cereals. This, at least, is what the official handbook of the garden says. It may be that the famous "fever-plant" has lost some of the faith accorded to it at first.
At the end of this great greenhouse there is a beautiful grotto where a little brook loses itself playing hide-and-seek among the fronds of the maiden-hair and other lovely ferns. At the right of this grotto is a reading-room where visitors may find all the current periodicals—on the left, the library of the society, rich in works upon agriculture, zootechnie, natural history, travels, industrial and domestic economy, etc., in several languages. The remarkable thing about this great greenhouse is the ever-flourishing, ever-perfect condition of its vegetation. Of course this effect must be secured by succursal hothouses, not always open to visitors. No tree, no plant, ever appears there in a sickly condition, but this may be said also of the animals in the gardens. I shall not soon forget a great wire canary cage some sixteen or more feet square, enclosing considerable shrubbery and scores of birds. There I received my first notion of the natural brilliancy of the plumage of these birds: its golden sheen literally dazzled the eyes.
The garden does excellent work for the French people besides furnishing a popular school and an inimitable pleasure resort: it assures the preservation of approved varieties of fruits, grains, animals. Whoever questions the absolute purity of his stock, from a garden herb up to an Arabian steed, can place this beyond question by substituting those furnished by the Society of Acclimatation. Eggs of birds packed in its garden have safely crossed the Atlantic, seventy-five per cent. hatching on their arrival. So immensely has the business of the society increased that more ground has had to be secured for nursery and seed-raising purposes, and the whole vast Zoological Gardens of Marseilles have been secured and turned into a "tender," as it were, to the Jardin d'Acclimatation at Paris. This was a very important acquisition. Marseilles, the great Mediterranean sea-port of France, is necessarily the spot where treasures from Africa, Asia and the South Sea Islands have to be landed, and they arrive often in a critical condition and need rest and careful nursing before continuing their journey.
One of the functions of the garden is to restock parks with game when the pheasants, hares, wild-boars, deer, etc. become too rare for good sport: another is to tame and break to the harness certain animals counted unmanageable. The zebra is one of these. The society has succeeded perfectly in breaking the zebra and making him work in the field quite like the horse. An ostrich also allows itself to be harnessed to a small carriage and to draw two children in it over the garden. Still another work of the society is to breed new species. A very beautiful animal has been bred by crossing the wild-ass of Mongolia with the French variety.
Among the rare animals of the garden may be mentioned the apteryx, the only bird existing belonging to the same family as the Dinornis giganteus and the still larger Epyornis maximus of Madagascar—monstrous wingless birds now extinct. One of the eggs of the latter in a fossil condition is preserved in the museum of the Garden of Plants in Paris. Its longer axis is sixteen inches, I think. It is, for an egg, a most wonderful thing, and on account of its size the bird laying it has been supposed to be of very much greater size than even the Dinornis giganteus, a perfect skeleton of which exists; but this seems to be a too hasty conclusion, for the apteryx, a member of the same family, has laid an egg or two in captivity, and one of these on being weighed proved to be very nearly one-fourth the whole weight of the bird, the bird weighing sixty ounces and the egg fourteen and a half.
The Tallegalla Lathami, or brush-turkey of Australia, is another rare bird. It does not sit upon its eggs, but constructs a sort of hot-bed for them, which it watches during the whole term as assiduously as a wise florist does his seeds planted under glass or as a baker does his ovens. As in the ostrich family, it is the male that has the entire care of the family from the moment the eggs are laid—a fairer division of labor than we see in most ménages. The interesting process of constructing the hot-bed has been observed several times in Europe. It is as follows: When the time arrives for the making of the nest the enclosure is supplied with sticks, leaves and detritus of various kinds. The male then, with his tail to the centre of the enclosure, commences with his powerful feet to throw up a mound of the materials furnished. To do this he walks around in a series of concentric circles. When the mound is about four feet high the female adds a few artistic touches by way of smoothing down, evening the surface and making a depression in the centre, where the eggs in due time are laid in a circle, each with the point downward and no two in contact. The male tends this hot-bed most unweariedly. "A cylindrical opening is always maintained in the centre of the circle"—no doubt for ventilation—and the male will often cover and uncover the eggs two or three times a day, according to the change of temperature. The observer, noting how intelligently this bird watches the temperature, almost expects to see him thrust a thermometer into his mound! On the second day after it is hatched the young bird leaves the nest, but returns to it in the afternoon, and is very cozily tucked up by his devoted papa.
One thing in the garden that used to greatly attract visitors was the Gaveuse Martin, a machine for cramming fowls in order to fatten them rapidly. The society considered Martin's invention of so much importance to the world that it granted him a building in the garden and permission to charge a special admission. The machine has since been introduced into the artificial egg-hatching establishment of Mr. Baker at Catskill-on-the-Hudson; at least, he has a machine for "forced feeding" which must greatly resemble Martin's. Specimens fattened by the Gaveuse Martin, all ready for the broche, used to be sold on the premises. The interior of the building was occupied by six gigantic épinettes, each holding two hundred birds. A windlass mounted upon a railroad enabled the operator (gaveur, from gaver, to cram, an inelegant term) very easily to raise himself to any story of the épinette. The latter was a cylinder turning upon its axis, and thus passing every bird in review. "An india-rubber tube introduced into the throat, accompanied by the pressure of the foot upon a pedal, makes the bird absorb its copious and succulent repast in the wink of an eye." Four hundred an hour have been thus fed by one operator. Fowls thus fattened are said to possess a delicacy of flavor entirely their own.