Monkeys for Machado

On his small, stubby-fingered hands last week President Gerardo Machado y Morales had the largest, finest private collection of live apes in the world. Rich, eccentric Senora Rosalie Abreu of Havana was the first human successfully to rear a chimpanzee born in captivity. Excessively difficult, this feat has been performed only seven times, and of these seven records, four go to the credit of Cuba's famed "Monkey Mistress." Some years ago this good lady's sister Martha, tolerant of chimpanzees, died. For reasons of their own the Monkey Mistress's son Pierre and daughter Lilita moved to Paris. Senora Rosalie was left alone in Havana with her 120 simians. Last week in her sumptuous Villa Palatino she died at the age of 65, cut off her unappreciative children without a single monkey, left the lot to be established by President Machado as an endowed and public Cuban monkeyhouse. "It was largely her pioneer work," said Director William Reid Blair of the New York Zoological Park (Bronx Zoo), "which influenced Professor Robert M. Yerkes, head of the Yale psychology department, to establish the Yale station for research on anthropoid apes at Orange Park, near Jacksonville, Fla., where a chimpanzee was born about two months ago, under conditions suggested by Senora Abreu."*

2,000 Turtles

Chicago citizens were surprised last week to see 2,000 bewildered, chilly box turtles crawling about a vacant lot on Michigan Avenue. Nobody knew where they came from. Humane society officials caught them, locked them in a dog-catcher's wagon, drove them to the Field Museum. Dr. Karl P. Schmidt, assistant curator of reptiles, was glad to get them. He planned to liberate them near Waukegan, Ill., study their habits.

The humane society's theory: some one had planned to commercialize turtle-racing, found it profitless, turned his imported racers loose rather than feed them.

Tycoons' Ducks

Virginia natives were chuckling last week over a story about Tycoons William Ellis Corey (steel) and Joseph K. Knapp (American lithographic) and some 3,800 wild ducks on their expensive Back Bay and Currituck Sound shooting preserves. The story was that Sportsmen Corey & Knapp, just to be sure of something to shoot at when they went ducking, caused expert duck raisers to hatch and raise 3,800 wild fowl. So fond of their homes did these ducks become, so fat did they grow on tycoon-bought grain, that when Sportsmen Corey, Knapp & friends appeared to do some shooting, the ducks would not get up and fly--an act essential to good form in duckshooting.

*This most modern of monkeyhouses was designed by Architects Ellery S. Husted and Richard A. Kimball of Manhattan, enterprising young Valemen, associated with famed Architect James Gamble Rogers.

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