I agree probably made for an educated man, but a lettered man of business rather than a natural scientist. The engraving is clearly allegorical: the German Lion and British Bulldog fight over the downed carcass of the Spanish empire. Meanwhile the clever American Fox waits for the two to fight and become distracted, allowing him his rightful ascendancy to the Mercantilist future. Dollars to doughnuts it letters to a blue-blooded American aristocratic family - Astor or Carnegie, maybe duPont.
Not wanting to be pedantic, but, didn't the Spanish Empire disolve long before the Unifiction of Germany (the first one)in the 1870's? Before that Germany was a collection of small independant states that were themselves pretty impotent in world collonisation. I'm not at all sure it is the British Bulldog either, they haven't got long jaws like the snarling animal portrayed. The two smaller animals look like Wolves to me trying to see off the Sabre-toothed Cat (No longer called 'Tiger' in modern textbooks). Surely it's nothing more than a picture of two types of predator just arguing over the ownership of a young Elephants corpse?
Harry
