me time
uttering his characteristic yell, designed, it would seem, to terrify
his antagonist. Instantly, unless he is disabled by a well-directed
shot, he makes an onset, and, striking his antagonist with the palm of
his hands, or seizing him with a grasp from which there is no escape,
he dashes him upon the ground, and lacerates him with his tusks.

"He is said to seize a musket, and instantly crush the barrel between
his teeth.... This animal's savage nature is very well shown by the
implacable desperation of a young one that was brought here. It was
taken very young, and kept four months, and many means were used to
tame it; but it was incorrigible, so that it bit me an hour before it
died."

[Illustration: HAND OF GORILLA, ORANG, GIBBON, AND CHIMPANZEE.]

SOME STRANGE NURSERIES

(FROM NATURE'S WORKSHOP.)

BY GRANT ALLEN.

[Illustration]

You could hardly find a better rough test of relative development in
the animal (or vegetable) world than the number of young produced and
the care bestowed upon them. The fewer the offspring, the higher the
type. Very low animals turn out thousands of eggs with reckless
profusion; but they let them look after themselves, or be devoured by
enemies, as chance will have it. The higher you go in the scale of
being, the smaller the families, but the greater amount of pains
expended upon the rearing and upbringing of the young. Large broods
mean low organization; small broods imply higher types and more care
in the nurture and education of the offspring. Primitive kinds produce
eggs wholesale, on the off chance that some two or three among them
may perhaps survive an infant mortality of ninety-nine per cent, so as
to replace their parents. Advanced kinds produce half a dozen young,
or less, but bring a large proportion of these on an average up to
years of discretion.

[Illustration: SEA-HORSES.]

Without taking into account insects and such other "small deer,"--to
quote Shakespeare's expression,--this fundamental principle of
population will become at once apparent if we examine merely familiar
instances of back-boned or vertebrate animals. The lowest vertebrates
are clearly the fishes: and the true fishes have almost invariably
gigantic families. A single cod, for example, is said to produce,
roughly speaking, nine million eggs at a birth (I cannot pretend I
have checked this calculation); but supposing they were only a
million, and that one-tenth of those eggs alo