Complete and unabridged, with 48 full-page plates by Karl Robert von Planitz, Rosa Bonheur and John Constable. Observations of animals gathered from naturalists, travellers and the author's own menagerie: how a beaver builds, what an elephant remembers, the domestic habits of ants and the reasoning of dogs. Sarah Lee had lived in West Africa with her first husband, the naturalist Edward Bowdich, and illustrated her own books. She is careful to separate what she saw from what she was told, which was not the custom. Forty-eight plates of animals and landscapes by painters including Rosa Bonheur and Edwin Landseer, from a Pyrenean sheepdog to the Hay Wain, give the naturalist's observations the settings they were made in.

Sarah Lee (1791-1856) went to West Africa with her first husband, a naturalist who died there, drew the specimens for Cuvier and Audubon, and wrote natural history for children out of what she had seen rather than what she had read.