REMINISCENCES FROM THE MELBOURNE ZOO. 
203 
guard. So, you see, strife over the color line causes trouble even in 
the animal -world; and the white-skinned variety of animal usually 
imagines itself to be vastly superior to those with harder-wearing qualities 
of fur. 
THE HARES. 
Miss Violet H. Morgan, of Clayton, gave an attractive brown hare 
to the Zoo. This is her account of its infancy : — 
“A friend of mine, when carting in his hay, the summer before last 
(1915), found the little leveret safely hidden under a sheaf in a stook 
of hay. He took it home and gave it to me next day. It could not eat 
herbage, and I fed it on milk twice a day. I had to get a bigger cage 
for him, and as he grew up and got teeth, he ate apples and carrots and 
grass. A strange thing I noticed was that he would not eat parsley. 
Now hares in their native state will travel for miles to visit a parsley 
patch. I used to give him his milk in a china bath — I mean the largest 
size canary bath we had. It used to hold a cupful, and he got that 
right up till the following May. When our shire dog-tax collector 
called and happened to see him, he told us that if a policeman saw him 
or a neighbor laid information, that we would be fined for keeping him 
in captivity, so I wrote to Mr. Dudley Le Souef, and he was delighted to 
have him. We took Brownie in one day and saw Mr. Le Souef, and after 
a chat he showed us some of his treasures in his museum. Then we 
took a walk and found Mr. Wilkie, who put some lucerne and water into 
the little house, and then unnailed the lid of Brownie’s cage and tipped 
him out. He had really to tip him out of the box into the cage, for he 
just sat on the edge and looked all round him. When he got him out of 
the box he hopped round the cage, got saw-dust all over his whiskers, 
and tried his little nest in the corner and then nibbled the lucerne, and 
finally sat up in the middle of the fioor and proceeded to clean his face. 
About a year afterwards we went out to the gardens to see him, and 
he was still in his villa, as cheeky as can be. Mr. Le Souef says he has 
never before known of one being tamed and reared from a baby so young. 
So, you see, I always have a warm corner for the gardens, for I was very 
fond of master Brownie. He would lift up his voice on the least provoca- 
tion, and he could cry ‘like he was twins.’ ” 
Brownie was given a very interesting mate, which is believed by 
some to be a real hybrid, a cross between a rabbit and a hare. But Mr. 
Le Souef thinks it is merely an extraordinary looking hare. When this 
curiosity was put in Brownie’s cage he sat up on his haunches and rubbed 
his nose first with one paw and then with another, as if he were literally 
