post. The reptile, coming round as usual every night, seized the dog, was taken by the piece of wood, which stuck across his throat, in his struggles drew the bed to the window, and waked the people, 'who kill'd the allagator which had done them much mischief.' Sir Hans also records that there was 'a pottle of stones' in the belly of one nine feet long. Ravenous as the alligators are, they are, like serpents and tortoises, capable of enduring a very long fast. Browne, in his Natural History of the same island, which Sloane so ably illustrated, remarks that they are observed to live for many months without any visible sustenance; which experiment, he says, is frequently tried in Jamaica by tying their jaws with wire, and putting them, thus tied up, into a pond, well, or water-tub, where they often lie for a considerable time, rising to the surface from time to time for breath. He also asserts, that on opening the animal the stomach is generally found charged with stones of a pointed oval, but flatted shape, to which they seem to have been worn in its bowels.

Doubtless (adds the worthy Doctor) it swallows them, not only for nourishment, which is evident from the attrition and solution of their surfaces, but also to help its digestion, and to stir up the oscillations of the slothful fibres of its stomach, as many other creatures do. Some people think it swallowed them to keep them easier under water at times; but how reasonable soever this conjecture may seem to some people, it will not take with such as are better acquainted with the nature of aquatic animals.

Catesby* thus draws their portraits :

In Jamaica, and many parts of the continent, they are found above twenty feet in length; they cannot be more terrible in their aspect than they are formidable and mischievous in their natures, sparing neither man nor beast they can surprise, pulling them under water, that, being dead, they may with greater facility, and without struggle or resistance, devour them. As quadrupeds do not so often come in their way, they mostly subsist on fish; but

* Carolina.

as Providence, for the preservation, or to prevent the extinction of defenceless creatures, hath, in many instances, restrained the devouring appetites of voracious animals by some impediment or other, so this destructive monster, by the close connexion of the joints of his vertebræ, can neither swim nor run any other ways than straightforward, and is consequently disabled from turning with that agility requisite to catch his prey by pursuit. Therefore they do it by surprise, in the water as well as by land; for effecting of which Nature seems, in some measure, to have recompensed their want of agility, by giving them a power of deceiving and catching their prey, by a sagacity peculiar to them, as well as by the outer form and colour of their body-which on land resembles an old dirty log or tree; and, in the water, frequently lies floating on the surface, and there has the like appearance, by which, and his silent artifice, fish, fowl, turtle, and all other animals, are deceived, suddenly catched, and devoured.

Catesby also mentions their habit of swallowing stones and other hard substances, not, as he thinks, to help digestion, but to distend and prevent the contraction of their intestines when they are empty. In the greater number of many which he opened, nothing appeared but chumps of light wood and pieces of pine-tree coal, some of which weighed eight pounds, and were reduced and worn so smooth from their original angular roughness, that they seemed to have remained there many months.

Dr. Buckland, in his Bridgewater Treatise, well observes, that in the living subgenera of the crocodilian family we see the elongated and slender beak of the gavial constructed for feeding on fishes; whilst the shorter and stronger snout of the broad-nosed crocodiles and alligators gives them the power of seizing and devouring quadrupeds that come to the banks of rivers in hot countries to drink. As there were scarcely any mammalia during the secondary periods, while the waters were abundant, we might, à priori, expect, he remarks, that if any crocodilian forms then existed, they would most nearly resemble the modern gavial. Accordingly, those genera only which have elongated beaks have been

found in formations anterior to, and including the chalk; whilst the true crocodiles, with a short and broad snout like the alligator, appear for the first time in strata of the tertiary periods, in which the remains of mammalia abound.

Though neither crocodile nor alligator exists in Europe, nor ever, I believe, has existed there since that quarter of the globe was peopled, there was a time when this now temperate island must have teemed with animals only able to exist in warm latitudes, and when its hotter clime presented a congregation of all the crocodilian forms now so widely scattered and separated. What geographical changes has the world undergone since that time! How different was the face of this fair island before the eocene deposits were formed!

At the present day the conditions of earth, air, water, and warmth, which are indispensable to the existence and propagation of these most gigantic of living saurians, concur only in the tropical or warmer temperate latitudes of the globe. Crocodiles, gavials, and alligators now require, in order to put forth in full vigour the powers of their cold-blooded constitution, the stimulus of a large amount of solar heat, with ample verge of watery space for the evolutions which they practise in the capture and disposal of their prey. Marshes with lakes-extensive estuaries—large rivers, such as the Gambia and Niger, that traverse the pestilential tracts of Africa-or those that inundate the country through which they run, either periodically, as the Nile for example, or with less regularity, like the Ganges, or which bear a broader current of tepid water along boundless forests and savannahs, like those ploughed in ever-varying channels by the force of the mighty Amazon or Oronooko,—such form the theatres of the destructive existence of the carnivorous and predacious crocodilian reptiles.*

Well may the gifted Professor ask, What must have been the extent and configuration of the eocene continent which was drained by the rivers that deposited the masses of clay and sand, accumulated in some parts

* Owen's History of British Fossil Reptiles, now in course of publication.

of the London and Hampshire basins to the height of one thousand feet, and forming the graveyard of countless crocodiles and gavials? whither trended that great stream, once the haunt of alligators and the resort of tapir-like quadrupeds, the sandy bed of which is now exposed on the up-heaved face of Hordwell Cliff?

No one is better qualified to give an answer to such questions than the deep-thinking and eloquent querist. Everything must fade after the vivid picture here presented, and with it we close the scene :

Had any of the human kind existed and traversed the land where now the base of Britain rises from the ocean, he might have witnessed the gavial cleaving the waters of its native river with the velocity of an arrow, and ever and anon rearing its slender snout above the waves, and making the banks re-echo with the loud and sharp snappings of its formidably-armed jaws: he might have watched the deadly struggle between the crocodile and palæothere, and have been himself warned by the hoarse and deep bellowings of the alligator from the dangerous vicinity of its retreat. Our fossil evidences supply us with ample materials for this most strange picture of the animal life of ancient Britain, and what adds to the singularity and interest of the restored tableau vivant is the fact, that it could not now be produced in any part of the world. The same forms of crocodilian reptiles, it is true, still exist, but the habitats of the gavial and the alligator are wide asunder, thousands of miles of land and ocean intervening: one is peculiar to the tropical rivers of continental Asia, the other is restricted to the warmer latitudes of North and South America; both forms are excluded from Africa, in the rivers of which continent true crocodiles alone are found. Not one representative of the crocodilian order naturally exists in any part of Europe; yet every form of the order once flourished in close proximity to each other, in a territory which now forms part of England.

December, 1850.

336

CHAPTER XIII.

METTEZ les deux chameleons ensemble,

Celuy d'Egypte, et celui d'Arabie :

On trouvera difference en leur vie,

Mesme en couleur l'un l'autre ne ressemble,

says the quatrain with which the portrait of the chameleon* is enriched in the Portraits d'Oyseaux, Animaux. Serpens, Herbes, Arbres, Hommes et Femmes, observez par P. Belon du Mans, and the record is true. Of this curious form of the lacertine race there are several species, and every year many arrive in this country to linger out an unnatural existence of a few weeks.

In a state of freedom, and in its natural haunts, the chameleon would seem to be a very different being from the torpid invalid seen here in confinement. Hasselquist speaks almost rapturously of it, calling it an elegant creature.' He tells us that it is frequently found in the neighbourhood of Smyrna, particularly near the village Sedizeud. There he describes it as climbing the trees, and running among the stones. The people of the country told him that it lived in hollow trees. Hasselquist was not an eye-witness of this habit; but often saw it climb on the branches of the olive, plane, and other trees. He had seen the chameleon of Egypt; but observes that it is less than the Asiatic, and is not often met with.

When Hasselquist made all the inquiry he could con

* The ancients wrote of an herb of the same name which grew among the rocks on the sea-shore, and was said to change the colour of its flowers thrice a-day.