NATIONAL ZOOLOGICAL PARK—BAKER. 467 
tourists seem to take a particular pleasure in shooting them, have 
become comparatively rare. The demand is so considerable that they 
are reared for sale. Visitors to Florida often bring home young ones 
as curiosities, and then, as the creatures grow larger, find it incon- 
venient to keep them, so present them to the park. They grow rather 
slowly, the largest finally attaining a length of about 16 feet. The 
largest speciman at the park is not more than 10 feet long and has not 
grown in length since his arrival 20 years ago. In the warmer climate 
of its native haunts it might have reached a larger size. During the 
cold season alligators remain quite torpid, eating but little and moving 
about but slowly. They can not endure the cold of winter without 
protection, and in Florida they bury themselves in the mud. JI am 
informed that one that escaped from confinement at White Sulphur 
Springs, W. Va., burrowed in beside a heating pipe, and came out 
safe and sound in the spring. When excited or angered they emit a 
peculiar hissing noise, and if they hear any distant, loud sound, like 
quarry blasting, they bellow like bullfrogs. Plate 25 shows the largest 
one in the act of yawning. They are not especially dangerous to man, 
but are very apt to snap up little dogs that come within their reach. 
Their cousins, the crocodiles, are much more vicious, snapping and 
biting at anything approaching them. The few that have been at the 
park have been particularly hard to manage on that account. 
THE POUCHED ANIMALS. 
The park possesses a number of specimens belonging to the very 
interesting group of marsupials, or pouched animals, so called because 
their young, born at a very immature stage of development, are imme- 
diately transferred by the mother to a peculiar pouch on the belly, in 
which they remain for some months, attached to the nipples. Most of 
these strange creatures are found in Australia and the adjacent islands, 
where the ordinary forms of mammals are almost wholly wanting. 
Different habits of life have caused these animals to vary much as do 
those of other climes, and we have vegetable feeders, flesh eaters, and 
insect eaters, approaching in form the animals of similar habits in 
other regions. Thus there is a marsupial that the colonists have 
termed a bear, another somewhat like a cat, others resembling rats 
and mice, and one very like a flying squirrel. 
One of the most striking forms is the so-called Tasmanian zebra 
wolf, or thylacine, shown on plate 26. This animal is also called the 
pouched dog, and is, in fact, more like a dog in appearance than a 
wolf. It is a flesh eater, and has been nearly exterminated by the 
farmers, who can not tolerate its incursions into the sheep pen and 
poultry yard. It is of a slate color, with black, zebralike stripes. 
It is found only in the island of Tasmania, where it lives in rocky 
caverns, coming out mostly at night. 
