Page:The Zoologist, 1st series, vol 1 (1843).djvu/70

42 out what a quantity of spongy-looking but hard substances strewed along the shore could possibly be. They were extremely numerous in a little bend of the river, just below the town. I found out that they were the dermal bones of alligators, w r hich had either died of a good old age—" exactis non infeliciter annis"—or had fallen victims to the rifles of the militia and troops constantly passing up and down the river in the steamers; with these fellows a floating alligator being a favourite mark. This slaughter must have very much thinned them, in fact Black Creek, formerly the metropolis of alligators north of Lake George, when I visited it, was nearly as free from them as from Indians, though only a few years before, its shores might probably have boasted the biggest specimens of both species to be found in Florida. I must just add in conclusion my opinion that the alligator has been very ill used by the reports of travellers, and that far from being a ferocious beast, where man is concerned, he is mighty civil, generally dropping quietly into the water at the sight of human beings, to avoid alarming them by his ugly visage and gigantic carcass; or it may be from having learned by experience that in Florida the crack of a rifle is no rare accompaniment to the splash of an oar.—Edward Doubleday; 10, Newington Crescent, October 14, 1842.

addressing the British Association, said that he had never been so much astonished by the powers of any man, as when perusing the geological descriptions of Mr. Miller, as published in the Witness newspaper: that wonderful man described these objects with a felicity which made the Doctor ashamed of the comparative meagerness and poverty of his own descriptions: he would give his left hand to possess such powers of description. Mr. Murchison also remarked that he had seen some of Mr. Miller's papers on Geology, written in a style so beautiful and poetical, as to throw plain geologists like himself into the shade. Praise from such men precludes