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.