ALBINISM 



the white axolotls, often to be seen in adjoining tanks. 

 As in the case of many other creatures, albinism occurs 

 not infrequently ; and the milk- while albinos, with their 

 red gills, are of striking appearance. In many years a 

 series of experiments, conducted, though without a 

 licence, upon living animals, are undertaken upon the 

 corpora vilia of these axolotls. The experiments con- 

 sist in gradually reducing the depth of the water at one 

 end of the tank by means of a shelving board. Up this 

 board it is hoped with unrewarded persistence that these 

 axolotls will creep, and having arrived at dry land will 

 cease to be axolotls at all and become amblystomas. 

 The axolotl, in fact, is a creature that has discovered 

 the secret of perpetual youth. But this desirable dis- 

 covery is tempered by the pains and cares of maternity. 

 For the axolotl is simply an unwieldy and overgrown 

 tadpole ; but a tadpole which has abandoned some of 

 the frivolity of youth and assumed family responsibili- 

 ties by the laying of eggs, which duly hatch out into 

 fresh series of axolotls. It was discovered a good many 

 years ago that the gills of the axolotl are directly com- 

 parable to the gills of tadpoles, and that the growth of 

 the newt was usually, and for a long period sometimes, 

 indefinitely arrested at the tadpole stage ; but that 

 under certain circumstances, especially the drying up of 

 the surrounding water, the gills withered away and 

 other changes took place ; these changes convert the 

 water-living axolotl into a land-living newt of, as was 

 once thought, quite a different genus, viz. Amblystoma. 

 It is a fact that the progress and growth of the axolotl 

 must be encouraged, not forced. The newts must be 

 induced to take to a land life by cutting short their 

 supply of water. It is no use trying the violent method 

 of snipping away their gills ; for the only result of that 

 is that they grow again, and a more obstinate axolotl 

 is produced. But it has been shown that an artificial 



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