Yesterday morning a short article appeared in the "North-China Daily News" concerning some alligators that a couple of fishermen had brought down from the Taihu Lakes and were offering for sale in the entrance of the Royal Asiatic Society's building in Museum Road. That article caught the eye of Dr. Hermann Hone, a keen entomologist, and by 1130 am. he had not only bought all four, but had completed arrangements to put them in proper crates, get them through the Customs, place them on board a German steamer, and ship them to the Berlin Zoological Gardens, Now alligators are fairly common in zoos all over the world, and in many cases the zoos have to sell the very young ones lest they be overrun with the animals. But as far as Dr. Héne knows, no zoo. in Europe has any live specimens of the Yangtze alligator, and hence the Gapjdity with which he purchased the four, The Yangtze alligator is said to be the oldest existing type of alligator, and is sufficiently rare to make ita prize for any z00.
Dr. Héne himself is not a collector of live animals. He is an entomologist, whose especial study is the moths end butterflies of the Far East and of the Yangtze River basin in particular. But, as he showed a "North-China Daily News" reporter yesterday, both the alligators and the butterflies help to prove that at one time the mouth of the Yangtze was in the Hangchow estuary and net where it is to-day.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.