Page:The Zoologist, 1st series, vol 1 (1843).djvu/279

Rh flourished and decayed, and still the tortoise dragged on its slow and unsympathising existence."

If we were to give full credence to the narration of Pliny, we could not doubt, that tortoises in these degenerate days, have lost much of their medicinal virtues, and been sadly "curtailed of their fair proportions;" for he expressly informs us, that "there be found tortoises in the Indian sea, so great that only one shel of them is sufficient for the roufe of a dwelling house"!

Passing by the second order, the Enaliosauria of Coneybeare, under which the different genera of our gigantic fossil reptiles are arranged, we come to the third order, the Loricata, which comprises the alligator and the crocodile. These formidable creatures are known to us only by the writings of travellers in tropical countries, by small alligators brought here occasionally as objects of curiosity, and by the skins of larger individuals exhibited in public museums. Yet, with the exception of some of the larger Mammalia, there are perhaps none of the animals of warmer latitudes with whose appearance and history we are more familiar. Hence no one doubts for a moment the meaning of Mrs. Malaprop, when, with her usual felicity, she speaks of "an allegory on the banks of the Nile."

The accounts given by some ancient writers of the size of some of these reptiles, are such as we might expect from people among whom incorrect and exaggerated ideas were still current. We are told by Pliny, that Regulus encountered in Africa a serpent a hundred and twenty feet long, which he and his army could not subdue, except by discharging against it all their instruments of war (balistis atque catapultis). If such ideas of magnitude were still extant in Hamlet's time, we may well imagine he proposes an impossible undertaking, when he asks, in his passion with Laertes, —

In Antony and Cleopatra we are amused with the playful description of the creature given by Antony, in reply to the question of Lepidus—"What manner o' thing is your crocodile?"

"It is shaped, Sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth," &c. Sec. Concluding with the intelligence—"and the tears of it are wet."

In the same scene we have the doctrine of equivocal generation introduced.