text:  We next find the khan in the Zoological Gardens his matter-of-fact description of which affords an amusing contrast with that of those veracious scions of Persian royalty who luxuriate in "elephant birds just like an elephant but without the proboscis and with wings fifteen yards long"--"an elephant twenty-four feet high with a trunk forty feet long;" and who assure us that "the monkeys act like human beings and play at chess with those who visit the gardens