"Monstrous Beaste"

The strange animal that Explorer Vicente Yanez Pinzon brought home from the new world in 1500 astonished the Spanish court. Their Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella ran their royal fingers through the soft-furred pouch on the beast's belly and marveled at such a freak of nature. In that age of exaggerations, the little cat-sized creature grew into weird shapes in the minds of men. To the Venetian court reporter, Peter Martyr, it looked like a "monstrous beaste with a snowte lyke a foxe, a tayle lyke a marmasette, eares lyke a batte, handes lyke a man, and feete lyke an ape . . ."

Through the years, even the name went through strange evolutions. Simla Vulpina (fox-monkey), after Martyr's description, turned out to be the Boschrot of Dutch explorers, the rat de bois of Louisiana's French trappers, didelphys in the classic zoology of Linnaeus and finally the modern opossum. This is the Indian name as recorded by Captain John Smith at Jamestown. But even Smith was wrong, said the King's surveyor in Carolina. The word was possum, preceded by a grunt, hence the opossum.

Dim and Dull. Mystery and myth have surrounded the home life and sex habits of the possum through four centuries. Now, in a new book called Possum (University of Texas Press; $6), complete with elaborate recipes for possum and 'taters, Dr. Carl G. Hartman, "pioneer possum embryologist and accoucheur," tells all.

The American marsupial, says Dr. Hartman, is a congenital moron. In its tiny skull there is room for only a meager brain. Fertility, not intelligence, is the reason for its survival. Its popping, jet-black eyes are all pupil and ought to be sharp at night, but even in daylight they are dim and dull. Only its hearing is keen (its thin ears curl over to keep out insects during sleep), and its bristling whiskers have a superfine sense of touch. On his short legs, the possum meanders in a slow, aimless shuffle. As a climber he shows his greatest skill, using his strong, ratlike tail and the opposing "thumb" on his hind feet to scrabble after autumn persimmons. He cannot hang by his tail as long as legend would have it, but he does "play possum" with stubborn persistence when in danger.

Marsupial Secrets.The female possum's habit of licking her pouch before giving birth is the source of what Dr. Hartman considers several preposterous possum legends. But for all its stupidity, the possum, in its sex life, is much like other mammals. After only 12 1/2 days' gestation, the mother props herself into a sitting position and delivers a large litter of tiny (20 can fit into a teaspoon), wormlike young. Still little more than squirming, pink embryos, the baby possums clamber upward over their mother's soft, warm underbelly and into the pouch that opens and closes like an old-fashioned tobacco sack. There they fasten themselves to one of 13 pinhead teats and are nourished for two months while they grow to the size of young rats. Outside the pouch, they are carried about clinging to their mother's fur and hair.

All this prying into marsupial secrets, says Dr. Hartman, is more than idle curiosity or an effort to explain away old folklore. In the possum's pouch, science can study living embryos outside the womb. Thus, from the thick-witted possum, man may learn some lessons on how to care for his own premature young.

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