"I advise you to take excellent care of that specimen; for when it is
gone, you never will get another. The species soon will be extinct."

This opinion has been supported, quite independently, by a lady who is
the highest authority on the present status of that species, Mrs. Mary
G. Roberts, of Hobart, Tasmania. For nearly ten years Mrs. Roberts has
been procuring all the living specimens of the thylacine that money
could buy, and attempting to breed them at her private zoo. She states
that the mountain home of this animal is now occupied by flocks of
sheep, and because of the fact that the "Tasmanian wolves" raid the
flocks and kill lambs, the sheep-owners and herders are systematically
poisoning the thylacines as fast as possible. Inasmuch as the species is
limited to Tasmania, Mrs. Roberts and others fear that the sheepmen
will totally exterminate the remnant at an early date. This animal is
the largest and also the most interesting carnivorous marsupial of
Australia, and its untimely end will be a cause for sincere regret.

[Illustration: WEST INDIAN SEAL
In the New York Aquarium]

THE WEST INDIAN SEAL, (_Monachus tropicalis_).--For at least fifty
years, all the zoologists who ever had heard of this species believed
that the oil-hunters had completely exterminated it. In 1885, when the
National Museum came into possession of one poorly-mounted skin, from
Professor Poey, of Havana, it was regarded as a great _prize_.

Most unexpectedly, in 1886 American zoologists were startled by the
discovery of a small herd on the Triangle Islands, in the Caribbean Sea,
near Yucatan, by Mr. Henry L. Ward, now director of the Milwaukee Public