390 Livingstone
tor of the zoo, Ota had already been put on display by WJ McGee in the
anthropology wing of the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, along with other
pygmies, as “emblematic savages.” Here, as later in New York, the aim was
to illustrate the stages of human evolution. Crowds came and controversy
fl ared. Ota was poked and taunted to such a degree that he made a bow
and fi red arrows at particularly obnoxious visitors; the whole episode of-
fended a range of black clergymen; and he was eventually removed from
the zoo for good.
Just where to place certain races in the natural order had long been
part of a Western exhibitionary impulse. Carl Hagenbeck, for example,
who spearheaded the idea of the zoo “panorama,” where animals were
exhibited in open spaces rather than in cages, introduced what he called
“anthropological- zoological” displays into his Hamburg Tierpark in 1874.^42
That year he had Lapps acting out daily life with reindeers before enthusi-
astic audiences. And in the years that followed he orchestrated some sev-
enty ethnographic performances—Oglala Sioux performing ritual dances
in the shadow of a constructed mountain proving to be among the most
popular.
Zoos, of course, were also about the transfer of animals from one place
to another. And it is not surprising that many had their origins in acclima-
tization societies aiming to domesticate foreign animals to new climatic
regimes. In France, the scientifi c community had a long- standing interest
in acclimatization, not least because it bore directly on matters of adap-
tation, inheritance, and evolutionary change. In fact the zoological gar-
den was in large measure the public laboratory of the Société Zoologique
d’Acclimatation which had come into being in 1854.^43 If successful long-
term adaptation of species to new environmental niches could be effected,
that would do much to confi rm the doctrine of the inheritance of ac-
quired characteristics and thus the biological transformism rooted in the
ideas of Buffon and Lamarck. So in nineteenth- century Paris, the breeding
and dealing of exotic animals was seen as contributing to agriculture and
industry, scientifi c advancement, and commercial success alike.
Much the same was true of botanical gardens. Prior to the nineteenth
century, they had performed several different roles.^44 By striving to gather
together the botanical riches of an expanding globe they hankered after the
Garden of Eden. Gardeners like John Tradescant in the mid- seventeenth
century were latter- day Noahs engaging in a task of spiritual and scientifi c
retrieval and reversing the global effects of negligence and depravity. At
the same time, as physic gardens, they acquired plants with medicinal
powers and were thus often connected with medical faculties. Now, in
an age of high empire, places like Kew Gardens became the repository