But the tourist's leisure, so far, has been too much occupied with blood and social damnation; let us look for a lighter mood: let us see him at the Zoo. Florence seems to have been the best stocked. Rabelais saw two Zoos there, and this was not an optical illusion of a credible kind, for he localises them differently; one at the Palazzo Strozzi with porcupines and ostriches as the "stars"; one near the Belfry, boasting lions and tigers. Moryson mentions one only, the Duke's, containing five lions, five wolves, three eagles, three tigers, one wild cat, bears, leopards, an Indian mouse which could kill a cat, and wild boars. After another fifty-year interval comes Evelyn, who looks down upon all the animals housed together in a deep court, a pleasanter confinement, he thinks, than the narrow cages of the Tower at London. But I have forgotten Audebert, who should have come between (1576) Rabelais and Moryson, and who found a Zoo near the "Annunziata," possessing fourteen lions, a tiger, an eagle, and a vulture therein. In 1592 at Prague there were twelve camels in the Emperor's Zoo, very probably the sons and daughters of those whom Busbecq brought back from Constantinople in the hope of naturalising them in Europe as beasts of burden,—not the only attempt of the kind, for Sir Wm. Brereton saw some so used in Holland, and a German others near Aranjuez. The leopards, moreover, in this same Imperial Zoo, were taken to assist in hunting. Experiments and novelties such as these, of course, provided a larger part of the interest of a journey then than is the case now, when such news is communicated immediately through the newspapers. We find Tommaso Contarini, ambassador to Flanders, greatly struck by the value of peat as fuel, and bringing back some to Venice to assist him in ascertaining if anything of the kind is obtainable near. Then there was "Der Einlasse," the complicated night-entrance to Augsburg, worked by mechanism which allowed a person to be admitted without seeing any one,—such a mystery that many allowed themselves to be locked out on purpose to see it work, and Queen Elizabeth sent a special agent to acquire the secret; in vain. But in Augsburg front doors were habitually opened by pulleys from some room, and shut automatically; it was at Augsburg, too, that a coach was to be seen "driven by engines" within it by the occupant so that it seemed to go of itself; it had been driven about the city.[54] This occurs in the year 1655; three years later fountain pens[55] were on sale at Paris for ten francs each, twelve to those whom the inventor knew to be eager to have one; that is, £5 to £6 in our money. Even an Italian might learn: like the Florentine who discovered in England what garden-rollers were, in their early solid-stone-cylinder form. But Tasso had the chance to learn something important and not only passed it by but places it first among the three customs in France which he strongly condemns. It is that in