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64 wearing down of their angles, seemed to have lain in the stomach for several months.

The female Alligator lays her eggs in hollows in the sand near the margin of the water, amassing for their reception a quantity of decaying leaves and other vegetable matters, and separating the different layers of eggs by layers of the same materials. The fermentation of the heap, when the whole is covered again with sand, is supposed to aid the heat of the sun, in the production of the young. Fifty or sixty eggs are laid in a season, in two or three batches. The mother keeps watch over the place, and after the young are excluded, tends them for months afterwards with much affection and care.

Though most abundant in the southern rivers, the Alligator extends far enough north to be within the influence of severe winters. Buried beneath the mud, however, at the bottom of his river or pool, he sleeps unconscious of the frost. If exposed at such times, sensation is found to be completely suspended, so that the body of the animal may be cut up without arousing him from his torpidity. It is not, however, frozen, and a few hours' warm weather, or the beams of the sun, are sufficient to restore his suspended animation.

Mr. Swainson's opinion of the comparative in-offensiveness of these huge reptiles seems to be contradicted by well-authenticated instances, in which their ferocity has been fatal to man.

Mr. Waterton thus records the fatal ferocity of an allied species, the Cayman of Surinam (Alligator palpebrosus, .), which is commonly reputed to be less bold than the former. "One Sunday