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 
295 
