The love for spectacles in which animals take part is inherent in human nature, and directed the current of popular amusements at a very early period of the world’s history. There is a natural pleasure in witnessing performances which illustrate the sovereignty which man’s intellect enables him to obtain over the largest and fiercest of the brutes. Some of the most beautiful of the classic myths are based on this dominion of man over the animal creation. The Centaurs were but early trainers and riders of horses, the vulgar imagination amalgamating the horse and its rider into one strange creature whose beneficent deeds rendered him worthy of deification. The chariot race is described by Homer as the most important item in the series of funeral games in honour of Patroclus. Chariot-racing was introduced at the 25th Olympiad (about B.C. 680), and racing by single horses in the 33rd Olympiad (about B.C. 648). Elephants were first introduced in the Roman circus in the year B.C. 251, when Lucius Metellus exhibited them as part of the spoil of his victory over the Carthaginians. Lions and panthers were first exhibited in B.C. 186 by M. Fulvius, after the Ætolian war. After this date wild beasts became a regular feature of the Roman entertainments. Scaurus, in B.C. 58, exhibited a hippopotamus and five crocodiles. Julius Cæsar introduced giraffes into Italy for the first time in B.C. 45; Augustus, a rhinoceros in B.C. 29. But these animals were used mainly for the _venatio_, or exhibition in which they fought against each other, or against man--the contrast between the old Circensian games and the modern performances being all in favour of our own times as regards humanity. The Performing Elephants.