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life in spite of u high temperature. This was in a travelling 
menagerie ^ in Genoa in 1903, and I was told that the bears 
were then doing their second summer in Italy and had been 
all the time in their travelling cage and had never had 
access to a bath, but were only from time to time washed 
down with a hose. 
The important factor in keeping wild animals well and 
happy in captivity is not the size of their cage but the 
personal attention given to them by their keeper. 
Mr. Hughes told me of a curious episode in which these 
bears took part. A short time ago a large python was found 
to have escaped from its cage in the Mysore garden during 
the night, and to have made its way into the quarters 
occupied by the polar bears who killed the python and ate 
part of it. Surely this must be the first record of polar bears 
making a meal off a snake ! 
(viii) A herd of thirteen albino Blackbuck, Antilope 
cervicapra. These white antelopes are regularly 
bred in Mysore and, I believe, nowhere else. 
A very remarkable fact Mr. Hughes told me is 
that the young bred from white parents are at first 
normally coloured, and as they become adult 
lose their pigmentation and become pure white. 
(ix) A Markhor, Capra jalconeri, 
(x) At the time of my visit there was no specimen 
of the gaur, or Indian Bison, Bos gavriis^ 
at Mysore. Mr. Hughes told me that only 
about a week before one had died from inflam- 
mation of the liver, and that another individual 
lived in this garden for eleven years, eventually 
dying of rinderpest. 
(xi) Three Giraffes, Giraffa camelop)ardalis {see PI. 
VI), a male and a female imported from Africa 
and a female born here. Their enclosure is 
surrounded by a fence of particularly light 
appearance, made out of metre gauge railway 
iron. Inside this fence there is a dry ditch 
about 4 feet (1*21 metres) deep and 10 feet 
* J. Ehlbeck’s Menagerie. There were five Polar Bears at Genoa, May 26, 190B. 
