From end to end it is covered, and on its
huge and flattened head especially, with blotchy
manginess of a diseased and mouldy order. And
this is your notion, Andrew, of a fossil man, is
it? Oh, Andrew, Andrew!

But this Salamander is the culminating point
of all delusions, and of none more obviously
than that which the Zoological Society seems
to have entertained with regard to its appetite.
In their hospitality towards the stranger, this
body has filled his tank with little fishes, even
to overflowing, yet we read in Goldsmith of a
specimen of this tribe which lived eight months
without taking any nourishment whatever.
“Indeed,” the writer adds, “as many of this kind
are torpid, or nearly so, during the winter, the
loss of their appetite for so long a time is the
less surprising.”

There never was a worse shot made than
attributing any fiery properties to the Salamander.
It appears to be one of the dampest and—
if the expression is allowable—sloppiest animals
that exist. “Salamanders,” says Buffon, “are
fond of cold, damp places, thick shades, tufted
woods, or high mountains, and the banks of
streams that run through meadows. ... it
is commonly only when rain is about to fall
that it comes forth from its secret asylum,
as if by a kind of necessity to bathe itself, and
to imbibe an element to which it is analogous.
The moderns,” Buffon continues, “have followed
the ridiculous tales of the ancients, and as it is
difficult to stop when once the bounds of
probability are passed, some have gone so far as to
think that the most violent fire could be
extinguished by the land Salamander. Quacks
sold this small lizard, affirming that if thrown
into the greatest conflagration it would check
its progress.” The unhappy beast, too, has been
in this respect the subject of many experiments,
and because when it was thrown into the fire it
was sure to burst and to eject its natural fluid in
doing so, the Philosophical Transactions—with
whose compilers we would rather, by-the-by, after
this specimen, have philosophical transactions
than business ones—tell us that this is the method
taken by the animal to extinguish the flames.

So much for the Salamander, the largest and
ugliest lizard that ever was seen; and in that
capacity, and as a zoological curiosity, well worth
going to see.

Your Eye-witness is always prepared for a heap
of straw or a blanket—and nothing else—when
there is any new animal at the Zoological Gardens
about which public curiosity is much excited.
Has anybody ever seen the apteryx? Your servant
has friends who declare that they have examined
this creature carefully, and who will go into
particulars in their description of it. But are these
friends to be trusted? Your Eye-witness owns at
once that he has never seen this extraordinary
wingless bird. He has frequently seen its cage.
He has read its label. He has gazed through the
bars, and studied minutely every fibre of the
neatly arranged straw in one corner of the den,
but that is all. A heap of straw, or a blanket, or
an empty cage, with what you take at first to be
a larger pebble than usual in the sand, but which
turns out to be the animal you are in search of
—these are gratifications to which your servant is
so accustomed, that when he came to the abode of
the whale-headed storks, or balæniceps, he was no-
way surprised to see simply an inner cage entirely
concealed behind a straw blind, and nothing else.

“This is as it should be,” said your E.-W.,
when a friendly-looking keeper, coming up with
a bunch of keys in his hand, and seeing your
servant staring through the bars, asked him if
he would like to go in and have a look at them.

With the exception of Livermore, who is
always sick, and Chopfall, whose wife's mother
lives in the house with him, the two birds which
your Eye-witness discovered when he peeped
behind the straw blind were the most melancholy
living creatures he has ever beheld. Weak in the
legs—the limbs of one of the two specimens
had doubled up under him like elbows, or knees
turned the wrong way—over-weighted in the
bill, bald in the head, small and despairing in the
eye, and shut in behind an eclipse of straw, the
whale-headed stork is far from an exhilarating
subject of contemplation. The keeper who showed
them, sighed as he did so, and said “they had not
been there long,” as an excuse for their depression.

But why whale-headed? Here is another
fraud upon the public. Are whales possessed
of enormous bills that weigh them down, and
pull them forward to the earth? Have whales
bald, flesh-coloured, fluffy heads? If such be the
characteristics of whales, then has your servant
been all his life deluded by wicked picture-
books, which have represented the whale without
any of these remarkable and interesting
features. Your Eye-witness gazed long, and
with affectionate sympathy, at the two birds on
whose privacy he had intruded. They were too
melancholy to take the slightest notice of him.
The specimen which had sunk down on its
elbows was lost in astonished contemplation of
its companion who still managed to keep erect:
a circumstance which really did seem, considering
its legs, and their obvious readiness to
double up, no less creditable than surprising.

“They seem a little dull,” said your Eye-
witness, as he took his leave.

“You see, sir,” said the man once more,
sighing heavily as he spoke—“you see, sir,
they’ve only just come.”

The Ninth Journey of
THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER,
A SERIES OF OCCASIONAL JOURNEYS,
BY CHARLES DICKENS,
Will appear Next Week.