GIANT TORTOISES.

Evening Post, Volume LXXX, Issue 38, 13 August 1910, Page 10

GIANT TORTOISES.

AGED IMMIGRANTS AT THE LONDON "ZOO." Two of the largest elephantine tortoises' ever seen m England have arrived at the London Zoological Gardens, with three smaller companions. Their weight is measured in hundredweights and their age in centuries, writes a specialist in the Daily Mail. If the estimate of the- 260 years which were allotted to their predecessor "Methusaleh" was correct, the giant brethren which have justly been placed in the tortoise paddock must have seen three hundred summers at least. Shakespeare and Sir Walter Raleigh were living men when these two relics first broke their shells at Aldabra — the island in. the Seychelles group of tho Indian Ocean — from which they are now unwilling emigrants. A feature of this wonderful pair is the perfection of their shells. Methusa- | leh's carapace v/as rubbed almost smooth when he arrived, but the newcomers' embossed armour is in a beautiful state of preservation — the assumption being that their lives have been cast in more peaceful circumstances. Thousands of visitors have paid court to the baby giraffe born recently. , The mother, a true Socialist, leaves the feeding of her infant to the State — represented by a keeper with a bottle of milk. However, the six-foot infant gambols like. a clumsy lamb — one of the quaintest sights imaginable. The weakness of the hind legs has disappeared and, in the words of a sporting expeit, "It is now eveq. money that it survives. When it was born it was 2 to 1 against."-