'80 Department of Conservation of Louisiana 



When first born an opossum, a kangaroo and a mouse 

 are about the same size— about half an inch in length, and 

 weigh about one to eighteen and twenty grains. 



The opossum's peculiar method of carrying the young 

 has given rise to a host of peculiar folk tales as to how 

 the birth of the young occurs, tales so outlandish and so far 

 from the actual facts, it is deemed necessary to set down 

 here the correct story of reproduction. A deeply rooted 

 tradition has it that the female opossum copulates through 

 the nose and that she blows the fruit of conception into the 

 pouch. 



The young, ranging from six to twelve in a litter (some- 

 times as many as fourteen), are born in a manner usual 

 to most mammals except for the fact that the little ones are 

 dropped from the usual organ in a very immature state. 

 They are blind, helpless, hairless and very, very small, 

 weighing scarcely more than two grains each. One scientist 

 placed 16 of the extremely minature young in the bowl of 

 a,n ordinary teaspoon which they just filled. 1 Although it 

 has been claimed they are picked up by the mother and 

 placed in the pouch, this is incorrect. The true facts about 

 the reproduction of the opossum have been known since 

 1823, when Barton of Philadelphia, in a paper sent to a Eu- 

 ropean philosophical journal on "Facts, observations and 

 (Conjectures relative to the generation of the opossum of 

 North America," set down the following findings, which 

 have been recently proved as correct by two later day in- 

 vestigators. 17 



As to the manner in which the young reach the pouch, 

 Barton combats two ideas as prevalent today as in 1823. 

 He first touched on the "opinion very generally adopted in 

 many parts of the United States" that the young are pro- 

 duced in the pouch. 



He recorded : "The young opossums unformed, and per- 

 fectly sightless as they are at this period find their way to 

 the teats (of the mother) by the power of an invariable, 



"■Hartman, Breeding Season of the Oi)ossum. Jour. Morp. & Physiol., 



\ 1 1 1 . I . I 0. 1 . 1 1 . 17 7. 



"Heauser, Chester H. and Hartman, Carl G., Dept. of Embryology, 

 •Carnegie Institution of Washington, Baltimore, Md., Journal of Mammalogy, 

 vol. 9, p. 62. 



