FROM caged men to caged beasts the transition is easy and natural. The Jardin des Plantes is probably the most popular institution in Paris, and, according to certain French writers whose eye by no means diminishes the magnitude of native objects, the most popular in the world. At all events, the names associated with this Parisian equivalent of our Zoological Gardens are glorious enough, including as they do those of Buffon, Cuvier, and other writers whose lustre is dimmed only by juxtaposition with those of the two greatest naturalists who ever lived. It is more to the names in question, whose reputation cannot decline, than to the collections which the establishment contains, that the Jardin des Plantes owes its fame.

The creation of this garden dates back to Louis XIII. It was two of this monarch’s physicians, Hérouard and Guy de la Brosse, who conceived the first idea of it. Having submitted their plans to the king, the two naturalists soon obtained letters patent for the acquisition, in the Faubourg Saint-Victor, of a suitable piece of ground. At its origin, however, the institution which was one day to earn a European fame was of very limited extent, and its collections were entirely botanical. Royal Garden of Medicinal Herbs it was called; and the first design of its founders had in fact been nothing more than the cultivation of plants possessing curative properties. In this character the garden was a mere supplement to the Faculty of Medicine. It served as a theatre of study for students in pharmacy; and the royal letters patent, signed “Louis,” provided that “no instruction in pharmacy shall be given at the School of Medicine.” “In the said garden,” runs another clause, “a specimen shall be preserved of every drug, whether simple or compound.”

Of the two founders of the Jardin des Plantes, one can only be said to have taken part in the work; for Hérouard died prematurely. It was Guy de la Brosse who did the planning and the classifying; and to him the credit of establishing the garden almost exclusively belongs.

One of the first botanists of his time, Guy de la Brosse himself furnished the garden with nearly every species of plant which was to be cultivated there. At the same time it must be owned that Louis XIII. showed himself, for the period, very munificent towards de la Brosse, who received an annual allowance of 6,000 francs for his professional services in connection with the institution.

During the first years of its existence the garden met with much opposition, and sometimes fell into a state of neglect. The Faculty of Medicine was jealous of this rival, and rebelled against the royal edict because de la Brosse did not seek to enlist the sympathies of its professors. For this exhibition of disrespect the Faculty suffered no punishment but that of having its remonstrances quite ignored; and Guy de la Brosse devoted all his energies to the enrichment of the botanical collection. His death, however, occurred three years after the inauguration, and his successors, as indolent as he had been indefatigable, let the garden run almost to weed. At length one of the professors of the Faculty imparted to it a new life. This was Fagon, one of Louis XIV.’s physicians, who seemed fitted for the task no less by his birth than by his studies; for he was a grandnephew of Guy de la Brosse, and had first seen the light within the precincts of the Jardin des Plantes.

Devoted to study, which he preferred to the distractions of a court where he was nevertheless an oracle, Fagon, already celebrated by the ability with which he had supported the theory of the circulation of the blood – at that time rejected by the Faculty – proved himself, with his natural passion for botany, an admirable director for the Jardin. In 1693 Louis XIV. conferred upon him the title of Superintendent.

Fagon’s period of service was indeed a prosperous one for the royal garden. With a generous nature, and gifted with that

savoir-faire

which is only acquired by contact with men, he was happy in the choice of his professors, and contrived, by his influence and liberality, to give a great impulse to the whole establishment. Besides grouping around him an illustrious body of specialists, he despatched agents to various foreign countries to discover specimens for his collection.

After the reign of Louis XIII. the superintendence of the Jardin des Plantes had been considered as essentially the business of one or other of the royal physicians. In consequence a succession of men filled the post who were total strangers to natural science, and quite unfitted to manage such an institution. Afterwards, incompetent directors removed from the staff of specialists all those who were worth retaining, and showed so little respect for the purposes of the garden that they cultivated part of it as a vineyard for their own private use. Colbert, when he visited the garden, was so indignant at this outrageous abuse, that he called for a pickaxe and himself commenced a work of destruction which he took care to have carried out forthwith.

Successive failures at length proved to the authorities that the superintendence of the Jardin was no suitable perquisite for a royal physician; and it was now that the illustrious Buffon was appointed “intendant.” From this moment the aspect of everything changed; and the institution rapidly earned a world-wide renown. Under Buffon it was completely transformed. From a simple apothecary’s plantation it became a depôt for all the riches of creation. He erased the inscription, “Jardin royal des herbes médicinales,” from over the door of entrance, and substituted for it the plain title of “Jardin du Roi.” Endowed with immense energy, the great naturalist employed all his influence towards enriching the establishment over which he reigned with the superiority of genius. When he first set foot in it the chief treasures of the museum were displayed in two little rooms of the edifice erected on the grounds, whilst in a third room, carefully removed from the gaze of the curious, were collected a number of inferior skeletons of men and animals. It was during Buffon’s administration that the great amphitheatre was constructed, which remains one of the most admired in Paris, as well as the chemical laboratories which surround it. The natural history galleries were, as might have been expected, by no means overlooked. He even extended them at the expense of his own allowance for lodging, which he reduced time after time, and ended by abandoning altogether. Although his main passion was for animals, Buffon gave earnest attention to the cultivation of plants. It was he who traced the plan of the garden very nearly as it exists in the present day.

The intendant of the Jardin des Plantes, who rendered such incalculable services to natural science, has been reproached with having written his immortal pages in foppish attire, with a sword at his side and his hand adorned with ruffles. This reproach, which has been so widely reiterated, deserves refutation. When Comte de Buffon appeared in society it was with the exterior of a gay cavalier; but in his study, when he was at work, his costume was so plain that it shocked a Franciscan friar of his acquaintance who saw a great deal of him at his château. If he was extravagant at all, it was in the exercise of his natural benevolence, which assumed quite a princely character.

The name of Buffon attracted from all parts magnificent presents to the museum. The King of Poland sent him a splendid collection of minerals, and the Empress of Russia, who had failed to entice him to her court, nevertheless presented him with some of the richest products of her country. Nor was this all. Pirates, who seized every cargo which came within their reach, are said to have spared the cases which they found addressed to so great a naturalist.

More fortunate than the human beings outside, the animals in the royal garden were in no way affected by the Revolution. The hateful title of their abode, however, was naturally changed; and the former Garden of the King became the Museum of Natural History. In 1792 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, the author of

Paul and Virginia

, was made director of the establishment; and the Convention, which with all its destructiveness showed constructive tendencies in regard to all matters of science, literature, and art, founded at the museum twelve chairs, which were filled by professors of human anatomy, zoology, animal anatomy, botany, mineralogy, geology, general chemistry, chemistry in its application to the arts, agriculture, and iconography.

The number of some of the chairs has since been increased, and a few new ones have been established; but, fundamentally, the organisation of the establishment remains what it was at the time of the radical transformation under the Convention. The professors appointed by the Convention went to work with the greatest enthusiasm, and all the invaders and explorers of the time were begged to supply the museum with whatever specimens of natural history they could offer. The collection, moreover, was increased by the activity and success of the French troops, with a view to the greater glory of France, and especially of Paris. The commanders of the French armies brought back with them, in the form of booty, the most interesting objects from the museums of the conquered cities. Holland having been overrun in 1798, a number of the curiosities belonging to the Stadtholder’s Museum were forwarded to Paris; and the celebrated naturalist, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, was sent to Lisbon, occupied at the time by a French army, to choose from the local collections whatever he might find suitable for the natural history museum at Paris. After a time the collection became too rich for the professors and officials who had to arrange it. Money and space were alike wanting; and at last the established authorities formally complained that the treasures forwarded to them by the victorious troops were too abundant.

Among the most celebrated professors attached to the museum of natural history may be mentioned Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, already named, Lamarck, Lacépède, and Cuvier.

The garden of the museum forms a spacious quadrilateral, bounded on the east by the Quai Saint-Bernard, on the north by the Rue Cuvier, on the south by the Rue Buffon, and on the west by the Rue Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.

Entering by the principal gate, the visitor finds himself opposite an immense flower-bed enclosed between two long avenues which were planted by Buffon himself. The avenue on the left leads to the school of stone-fruit trees, the collections of botany, mineralogy, and geology, the library, and the house inhabited by Buffon when he was superintendent of the place. The avenue on the right is bounded by the school of botany and the hothouses. Behind the botanical school a long avenue of chestnut trees leads by the side of the bears’ den from the hothouses to the quay. Between this avenue and the Rue Cuvier are the menagerie, the school of fruit trees, the galleries of anatomy and anthropology, the amphitheatre, the Administration, and, at the top of the garden, behind the hothouses, the labyrinth and the Belvedere. A number of exotic trees have been planted and cultivated in the Jardin des Plantes, thence to be transplanted and naturalised in France. One of the popular celebrities of the garden is the Cedar of Lebanon, which Bernard de Jussieu was bringing from the East with other specimens, when, made prisoner by the English, he was deprived of the whole of his collection, with the exception only of the young cedar tree, which he had sworn at all hazards to preserve. Keeping it in a hat, planted in suitable mould, he succeeded, after many vicissitudes, in bringing it to the haven where it has since so wonderfully thrived. The tree, cultivated with only too much care, wears an aspect which is not precisely that of its natural freedom, but which is not wanting in grandeur. “The old Titan,” writes a French naturalist, “several times decapitated by our icy climate, spreads more and more every year.”

Higher up, in an almost forgotten corner, in the midst of foliage, stands a column supported by a pedestal of minerals. This simple monument is in memory of a simple man. Beneath it rests the body of Daubenton, the friend and collaborator of Buffon, the “learned shepherd” to whom France owes its fine breeds of merino sheep, and the author of the new plan of organisation adopted by the Convention in 1793. Narrow, winding paths, overshadowed by yew trees, lead to the Belvedere, constructed during the reign of Louis XV. The bronze cupola of doubtful style, surmounted by a celestial globe, with a sundial and a motto, tells plainly the period to which this fantastic conceit belongs. The motto, however, is ingenious and charming: “Horas non numero nisi serenas”; in English, “I note only the hours of sunshine.” Buffon had here placed an apparatus which has disappeared. At twelve o’clock exactly the lens of the dial burned a thread, causing a ball of metal to fall with a sonorous clang.

Arrived at this point the visitor sees the garden stretching out at his feet. It is in the spring that the full beauty of flower and foliage reveals itself. On Sundays and fête days, when the weather is fine, the garden teems with people. Masses of promenaders come to find, beneath the shade of the avenues, verdure and fresh air; for not only is the Jardin des Plantes a great scientific school, it is the joy and the life of a populous quarter of the metropolis. It affords repose to fatigued workmen, the families of local residences resort to it, and generations of lighthearted children grow up in the midst of its charms.

Descending the labyrinth, behind the hot-houses, the visitor finds in front of him the door of the orangery, and to the left the entrance to the grand amphitheatre, where so many illustrious voices have instructed the world. Then, following the avenue which passes before the amphitheatre, he descends the length of the Rue Cuvier, and making on this side the tour of the menagerie, an enormous grampus, together with its skeleton, comes into view, guarding the entrance to the galleries of anatomy and anthropology. Farther on is the reptile menagerie, as well as a school of fruit trees, which French writers on the subject characteristically declare to be “without a rival in the world.”

At the angle formed by the Rue Cuvier and the quay, and following the latter, one comes to the aquarium of fresh-water plants. Willows hang their branches over the water, full of plants and sleepy fishes. All is shade, freshness, and tranquillity in this nook, which is the most picturesque and charming in the whole garden.

We have now returned to the principal entrance, facing the bridge of Austerlitz. In the immense flower-beds which ascend to the galleries, what chiefly strikes the eye is a square devoted to the cultivation of gaily ornamental flowers, where they seem to have more than their accustomed splendour. This particular effect is produced simply by means of skilful arrangement, based on those laws relating to the simultaneous contrast of colours which it was reserved for M. Chevreuil to discover. Each flower owes more to its neighbour than to itself. Isolated, it would lose that brilliant beauty which is lent to it by a clever juxtaposition.

Close at hand, in the great avenue to the left, is a modest café. The tables are ranged around the peeled trunk of an old tree, the first acacia planted in France, some hundred years ago, by Vespasian Robin, after whom it is named – even as a certain beetle was named after another famous naturalist, on whom his admirers thought thus to confer the highest conceivable degree of honour. A little farther on, in front of the building containing the collections of geology, stand other venerable trees. Finally one reaches, at the top of the garden and opposite the entrance in the Rue Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, a large square house built as the residence of Buffon, who, lodged at first in the buildings of the galleries, had given up his apartments to the growing collections. The name of Intendancy is still borne by this edifice. It was here that Buffon died.

Along the street which bears his name the garden is to-day still enclosed by the spiked iron railings which he himself caused to be erected. They protected the garden on the side of the country; but the country since then has retreated far away.

To come, however, to the menagerie, a noisy concert of parrots and cockatoos forms a prelude to the show, as one advances from the side of the amphitheatre. The birds of prey are enclosed in large cages with iron bars. The monkeys have a “palace,” where they disport themselves in the sunshine, to the great delight of sight-seeing crowds. The Rotunda is devoted to animals from hot latitudes – the elephant, for instance; the rhinoceros, and the hippopotamus. A striking peculiarity of the female hippopotamus in the Jardin des Plantes is that she has given birth several times to a tough-skinned baby, and always or nearly always killed it immediately with her terrible teeth.

The carnivorous animals are confined in a series of dens. The bear is the most beloved of all these formidable creatures. His pit is resorted to by masses of people who regard him quite as an old acquaintance, and call him by the name of one of his celebrated ancestors – “Martin.”

The reptile menagerie is contained in a low chamber, damp and narrow, where these cold, creeping animals pass their lives in comparative darkness. What to many forms the most curious spectacle in this menagerie is the remains of a strange repast in which, some years ago, one of the pythons indulged. This enterprising creature one fine night swallowed the blanket which had been placed over him to keep him warm; his digestion was excellent, but was not equal to blankets, and after a fortnight’s indisposition he threw it up in the condition in which it is now preserved.

In the long building which runs parallel to the Rue Cuvier are the galleries of anatomy and of anthropology. They occupy two large rooms on the ground floor, and the whole of the first storey round the courtyard, known as the Courtyard of the Whale. In its centre is a fine skeleton of an ordinary whale, and in one of the corners the skeleton of a spermaceti whale – in French “cachalot,” which, according to a fantastic etymologist, is derived from “cache à l’eau,” the animal being accustomed when threatened with attack to hide in the water.

The first room in the gallery of anatomy is filled with skeletons of the largest sea-animals. The adjoining room contains human skeletons, among which will be remarked that of Soliman-el-Halir, the assassin of General Kleber, put to death with frightful torture by the avenging French, who barbarously adopted the mode of punishment of the barbarous country they had invaded. Strange that the French, nearly a century after this offence against humanity, should still preserve a monument to revive its memory. To notice but one point, the finger-bones of the right hand are wanting. The hand was burnt off before the final punishment was applied – that of impalement, which the assassin endured for six hours without uttering a groan.

A narrow staircase leads to the first floor, in which the ante-chamber is full of animals’ heads. In the second room we are in the midst of monsters, most of which formed subjects of study to the two Geoffroy Saint-Hilaires, intent on finding immutable laws where science had previously seen nothing but the sport and caprices of chance. “Ritta Christina Parodi” was the name given to two heads on a single body born at Sassari in Sardinia, March 12, 1827. The two heads lived about eight months, one of them dying on the 20th of November, the other shortly afterwards, but not until there had been time to make, in regard to this strange being, some curious observations. Further on may be seen Philomèle and Hélène, two bodies on one pair of legs. They also lived. Finally, in the same order, are Olympe and Thérèse, joined together by the top of the head.

In the third room are the great anthropomorphous or man-shaped apes, arranged in an attitude not natural to them, since in nature they walk on hands and feet, but which brings out more vividly their resemblance to humanity. The broken teeth, the fractured limbs of these rangers of the forests – orang-outangs, chimpanzees, and gorillas – are evidence of their fights, their struggles, their adventurous life. The orang-outang is a war trophy. It belonged formerly to the collection of the Stadtholder of Holland, whence it was sent to Paris by the victorious French army, without being claimed and sent back by the allies in 1815, as undoubtedly would have been its fate had its history and its actual position been known.

In the waxwork collection (eighth room) many of the anatomical reproductions come from the château of the Duke of Orleans – known during the Revolution as Philippe Égalité – at Chantilly. Others, executed with rare perfection, are from Florence, always celebrated for this kind of work. At the entrance to the ninth room are two figures, considered marvels of ingenuity and of science in the last century, but now looked upon as, for purposes of study, next to useless: an “arterial” man and a “venous” man. Very curious, too, are the children’s heads, in which skilful injections, even into the most delicate veins, have given to the complexion the appearance of life. They have been furnished, according to the taste of the period, with enamel eyes, and to render them presentable to the public, each little head is enveloped in a lace cap. In the eleventh room will be found the collection of Dr. Gall, including the very heads on whose developments he formed his theory of localised faculties and cerebral bumps. It may here be observed that the followers of Gall have rendered his system questionable by giving to it in detail a value which he attached to it only in a general way. The collection contains, moreover, the bust of Dr. Gall himself, a cast of his head taken after death, and his very cranium, on which may be sought the special bump of phrenologism. Here, too, may be seen the masks of Voltaire, Casimir Périer, François Arago, and Jean Jacques Rousseau. This last was taken by the sculptor Houdon, at Les Charmettes, July 4, 1778 – the day after Rousseau’s death. A bust of Cuvier is to be seen on the ground floor, to which a staircase leads directly from the Gall collection. It is the work of David d’Angers, and stands in front of five skeletons of elephants, which seem to form for the great comparative anatomist a guard of honour.

In the anthropological gallery, on the first floor, the visitor finds himself on entering in front of a pleasing collection of human heads, all severed during lifetime from the bodies to which they belonged: those of Arabs and Kabyles, decapitated by the yataghan, and dried beneath the African sun. This at least marks a progress since the days when native malefactors were burnt and impaled. “Their narrow puckered lips,” says a French writer, “exhibit their white teeth in a grin which has been left significantly by a violent death.” Near these heads are the skulls of the ancestors of the modern French, the Franks and the Gauls, from whose tombs they have been taken. In this room is to be seen a curious and picturesque ethnographical collection: a number of Russian dolls, attired in the European, Asiatic, and American costumes of the various nationalities included in the vast empire of the Tsar. In the eighth room the ancient Peruvian mummies are well worth a glance. So, too, are the strange little human heads prepared by this now extinct race. From the head that was to be preserved the bones were first removed. Then the skin was dried, which in contracting kept its original shape. This, however much diminished, was still preserved. The head, indeed, may have shrunk to the size of one’s fist: the proportions are still the same, except that the hair is, by comparison, denser and in a greater mass. In the next room is a cast of a once well-known Hottentot woman who died in Paris, where she went under the name of the “Hottentot Venus.”

On the first floor to the left are two large rooms full of reptiles and fish. In these historic rooms Louis XV. placed the fine statue of Buffon which is still there, and beneath which may be read the famous inscription, which time has not falsified: “

Majestati naturæ par ingenium

.” The majesty of Buffon’s genius shows itself, it has been said, in his very style: an idea which may have been suggested by his famous saying: “

Le style est l’homme même

” – and not “

Le style c’est l’homme

,” as the phrase is generally quoted. All that Buffon meant, and all that Buffon said, was that a writer’s facts, and even his arguments and thoughts, are or may be made common property, whereas his manner of expressing himself is exclusively his own. The idea that an author’s personality necessarily reveals itself in his writings is contrary to experience, few authors, indeed, exhibiting the same character on paper as in ordinary life.

To return for one moment to the garden, and to those exotics which are cultivated with so much success in the Parisian climate. The most important of these – at least, in a commercial sense – is the tobacco-plant, now naturalised over nearly the whole of France.

The tobacco-factory of Paris, where so much of the native as well as foreign tobacco-leaf is prepared, consists of large buildings, five storeys high, situated between the Quai d’Orsay, the Rue de l’Université, the Rue Saint-Jean, and the Rue de la Boucherie des Invalides. The large gate in the Rue Saint-Jean affords entrance to tobaccos coming from all parts of the globe, of which the qualities have been ascertained beforehand by experts buying on samples which are preserved for comparison with each consignment as it arrives. The great national factory receives from the United States – Virginia, for instance, Kentucky, and Maryland – large shipments of tobacco packed in casks; from South America vast quantities in bales composed of skins. Java, too, and Manilla in the Pacific Ocean, Macedonia, Egypt, Greece, Algeria, Hungary, Holland, and finally France itself, contribute their share.

The anti-smokers of France naturally look with horror on the huge tobacco factory of their metropolis; and more than a century ago Valmont Bomare wrote the following lament: “I wish I had never known that in 1750 they estimated that Maryland and Virginia consigned each year more than a hundred million casks of tobacco to the English, who only consumed about half of it, exporting the rest to France, and thereby enriching themselves annually to the amount of nine million two hundred thousand francs.”

At present nineteen departments of France produce some fifty million pounds of tobacco, worth twenty million francs. The native tobacco growths are restricted by the often beneficial interference of the administration, which has to be consulted by growers in choosing the land for cultivation, and which even prescribes the varieties of tobacco to be grown.

The sale of tobacco is a monopoly in France, the shop-keeping tobacconists being really nothing more than Government agents for the distribution of cigars, cigarettes, tobacco,