222 NATURAL HISTORY ESSAYS 



flesh could hardly be improved upon ; it was found 

 that though impossible to poison it, the tiger wolf 

 could readily be taken alive in snares. Although 

 cordially detested by the settlers the thylacine long 

 flourished in the colony. In 1838 it occurred thirty 

 miles from Launceston, and Mr. Ronald Gunn, who 

 presented two specimens to the British Museum, 

 records that it was then quite common at Woolnorth, 

 in the extreme north-west of Tasmania, and in 

 the Hampshire hills, twenty miles from the sea. The 

 naturalist will readily picture a couple of thylacines 

 bounding through some moonlit valley — silhouetted 

 in sable on a field of silver, like the spectral hounds 

 of story ; and the terrified sheep scudding like fleecy 

 clouds before the grim figures of the destroyers. 



Mr. Gunn seems to have taken a special interest 

 in this animal, and Science is under a great obligation 

 to him for his valuable donations of material to 

 various institutions. Previous to 1843 he gave two 

 thylacines to the British Museum; in 1846 he 

 presented the skeletons of a pair to the Royal 

 College of Surgeons; in 1850 he forwarded to 

 England a female and three young ones as a gift to 

 the Zoological Gardens. These last formed the 

 subject of a paper by Dr. Gray in the " Proceedings 

 of the Zoological Society"; a fine drawing founded 

 on these specimens — the first ever brought alive to 

 England — appeared in Joseph Wolf's " Zoological 

 Sketches." Two years later Mr. Gunn, co-operating 



