YOUNG LION AT LECTURE

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22308, 24 January 1938, Page 7

YOUNG LION AT LECTURE

+ CHILDREN SHOWN RARE ANIMALS DK. JULIAN HUXLEY TALKS ON MONSTERS urmoy on owy corbibposdest.) I LONDON, December 29. Excitement was caused yesterday j among an audience of children at the ! Royal Institution, when a lion cub from the London Zoo was brought into the lecture hall. The occasion was the first of Dr. Julian Huxley's four Christmas lectures on "Rare Animals." The children sat in breathless silence. They had been warned by Dr. Huxley not to applaud, because the beast is of nervous temperament, but they clapped delightedly after he had gone out again. The cub, whose name is Max, did not enjoy his visit He was frightened of the crowd and the spotlight He sprawled on the ground and had to be helped out of the room by his harness and his taiL The cub was exhibited so that children could see the faint spots common to all baby lions and probably a survival from times when their ancestors lived in forests and were spotted. Dr. Huxley also brought some pure while gophers, rodents from Alberta,

which gave shrill cries like birds throughout the lecture, a black kite that rustled its wings, a sub-species of house mice from the Faro Islands, and a spiny ant-eater, half mammal and half reptile, which hissed loudly as the keeper held it up by its claws. £ Four Sea Serpents Part of the lecture concerned the origins of mythological monsters. There has been a great deal of talk lately about the Abominable Snowmen, reputed to be large, hairy, naked men living above the snow line on the Himalayas. Showing a slide of the double footmarks that gave rise to the legend. Dr. Huxley argued that they were the tracks of a large bear which put its hind paws into its front paw marks. Slides were also shown of four types of sea serpents. One was the Moha e Moha. seen in Northern Australia in a 1890 by a schoolteacher and attested t by other white eye-witnesses as well s as natives. r Dr. Huxley suggested that this and ' similar monsters might have been s shoals of porpoise, giant cuttle-fish, ? basking sharks or ribbon fish. He e also described how the mermaid was t perpetuated by travellers who saw i dugongs, aquatic mammals found in tropical seas. They appear to stand i up in the water carrying their young - at their breast. :. The unicorn, he said, might have i been based on the oryx, an antelope s with long pointed horns. Although it has two horns, it appears, when seen - sidewise, to have only one. Since in - mediaeval times the unicorn's horn a was thought to have wonderful raedici- . nal properties. Dr. Huxley told how e mediaeval travellers encouraged th« legend when they brought back tuska e from the East and sold them as unii, [ corn's horns.