I50 THE ODYSSEY OF AN ANIMAL COLLECTOR 
The other egg-laying mammal—the echidna—presents no great 
difficulty in captivity; in fact a simple diet of minced meat, milk, 
and raw egg is sufficient to maintain it in perfect health. 
Owing to its sharp spines and its extraordinary ability to remain 
flat on the ground so that the spines are uppermost, it is an aston- 
ishingly difficult animal to pick up, short of doing so with a 
shovel. There is one trick, however, that never fails. If a stick is 
pressed hard against his ribs on one side of the body, the hind 
foot on the other side will be projected outwards just beyond the 
spines to act as a stop, and this can then be grabbed. 
No other mammal has the ability to sink apparently out of sight 
into the ground like a submarine submerging. It never does this 
nose first but somehow scrapes the earth from under its body so 
that it slowly sinks and the earth gradually envelops it. This is 
accomplished much more quickly than one would imagine. 
The echidna has the typical ant-eater’s long thin snout with a 
mouth just large enough to allow the free movement of the long 
extensile tongue to which ants adhere when it is thrust in their 
midst. The in-and-out movement of the tongue, as in other ant- 
eaters, is very rapid. It seems to prefer small black ants, but doubt- 
less eats other small insects. 
Unlike the platypus, which deposits its eggs in a burrow, the 
echidna carries her single egg in her temporary abdominal pouch, 
where it is hatched and where the young one remains until too 
spiny to be comfortable to the mother. It is then left in a hiding- 
place and visited periodically to be fed. 
It was for long a mystery how such an animal could get the 
egg into her pouch, but it has now been established that she lies 
on her back and doubles herself up so that the egg is laid either 
directly into the pouch or is helped into it by the aid of the 
animal’s snout. 
The length of life of these lowly creatures is considerable judg- 
ing by one deposited in the London Zoo in 1912 by Lord Roths- 
child which lived until 1943, when it died of food poisoning! 
I was struck by the prevalence of albinism in Tasmanian mam- 
mals. These freaks with their pink eyes are to me never as attrac- 
tive as normal specimens, though many people seem to prefer 
