Page:The Zoologist, 1st series, vol 1 (1843).djvu/280

252 The same doctrine peers out upon us in another form, in the language of Othello in his jealous rage against Desdemona.

I know not to which of the old writers the honour belongs, of being the first to promulgate the fable that crocodiles, by their piteous cries, allure travellers to the water, and there destroy them. It seems for a very long period to have been a current article of belief. It does not appear in Pliny, though we find the usual intermixture of fact and fable. In our earliest prose work, the Travels of Sir John Mandeville between the years 1322 and 1356, some of the errors of Pliny are repeated, and we have a brief notice of the tradition that these creatures devour men, weeping while they do so. "In that Contre and be alle Ynde, ben great plentee of Cokodrilles, that is a manner of a long Serpent, as I have seyd before. And in the nyght, thei dwellen in the Watir, and on the day, upon the Lond, in Roches and Caves. And thei ete no mete in all the Wynter: but they lyzn as in a Drem, as don the Serpentes. Theise Serpentes slen men, and thei eten hem wepynge; whan thei eten thei meven the over Jowe, and nought the nether Jo we: and they have no Tonge."

By Purchas in his Pilgrimage the subject is introduced in the brief and casual way that writers adopt when speaking of some well-established truth. "Andrew Battell told me of a huge crocodile, which was reported to have eaten a whole alibamba, that is, a company of eight or nine slaves chained together, and at last payed for his greedinesse: the chain holding him slave, as before it had the negroes, and by his undigestible nature devouring the devourer, remaining in the belly of him, after he was found, in testimony of this victorie. He hath seen them watch, and take their prey, hailing a gennet, man, or other creature, into the waters. A souldier thus drawn in by a crocodile, in shallower waters, with his knife wounded him in the belly and slew him."

That Shakspeare should adopt an opinion so current is what we might naturally expect. He introduces the subject with great effect, in a passage where Queen Margaret compares the arts of Richard, Duke of Gloster, to those employed by the crocodile.