The true northerner. [volume] (Paw Paw, Mich.) 1855-1920, 1883-10-11
THE CROCODILE.
cerrors of u Mysterious Replica Chap
ter in Natural History.

rerrors of Mysterious Replica Chap
ter la Natural History.
Half the crocodile's terrors lie in It's
mystery. To see one floating in
stream, all its length disclosed, would,
40 doubt, be dreadful enough, but there
is a refinement of horror in the real at
,itude of the reptile; for all that is seen
Il the brute above the water are the
ayes, aud, some distance from them,
the nostrils, and by the space which
separates the eyes from the nostrils
you Judge the total length At the sub
merged crocodile. Again, when rush
ing upon its prey, it would, doubtless.
be u paralyzing sight ii the cruel
amphibian came along the surface,
with all its armament of teeth dis
played, gnashing its jaws and flashing
its tail. But conceive the horror of tie
victim when it sees upon the surface
only the ripple of the advancing but
unseen monster! It's fate is Just as
certain as if the thing came on, like
Andromeda's enemy, in full view, but
there is the awful horror added of an
Invisible approach. There is a wavelet
on the water-nothing more; but it is
the sign that crocodile is advancing
swiftly. And it was this mystery that
attracted the priests of the Pharaohs to
the brute. Like evil, 1t always came
out from darkness; like the hand of
fate, it was unseen but inevitable. So,
in Fhebes and Upper Egypt, the hideous,
half-revealed monsters of the Nile were
held III reverence as typnying the
powers of darkness anu irrevocable
catastrophe; and the priests, tanning
the largest of the kind they could find,
by perpetual debauches of food, adorned
them with jewels, piercing their ear
membranes SO as to hold rings, and
putting bracelets upon their feet, and,
thus begemmed, brought them up from
out of the reeds and obscurities of the
sacred river and showed them to the
people as the emblem of fate, terrible,
pitiless and incomprehensible.
In the natural history of the crocodile
there are some points of singular inter
est, which it would not be uninterest-
ing TO have illustrated at the Zoo.
Thus, for instance, crocodile's egg
would be a surprise to ali who saw it
for the first time, inasmuch as the
reptile which grows TO thirty feet in
length and is armed in maturity with
such ponderous scales, begins life in a
soft-shelled egg rather smaller than
that of Il goose. Again, young croc-
odile preserved in a bottle of spirits,
say five inches long, would be memoir
able illustration OF the origin of the
leviathan that, later on, laughs at the
shaking of a spear" Indeed, all the
crocodile's troubles are crowded to-
gether at the commencement of its
pilgrimage through life By and by it
has no enemies that it need fear and is
the unquestioned Autocrat of all the
BUSHES. But at first there is nothing
that moves, be it fish, flesh, or fowl, of
which the tiny crocodile is not afraid.
AS if conscious of the future power of
the insignificant lizard, everything that
can catch it eats it. The eggs are
sucked whenever found by creatures of
the weasel kind, and, where such exist,
by turtles. AS soon as the little reptile
is Matched, fish swallow it, birds peck
it up, the ichneumon eats it. Yet, in
spite of such universal conspiracy
against it, the species always manages
to maintain sufficient number alive to
make itself the everything terror of the
waters it haunts, and by and by avenges
itself by ruthless and smnivorous de-
struction upon each and all of the
orders of creation that had vainly and
greelily combined for its extinction in
infancy. Reptiles basking on the bank,
birds floating upon the surface of the
water, fish swimming, animals drinking
ut the river, or wading in it; all pay
tribute to it; and just as at its birth the
crocodile was safe from nothing that
had breath, so now nothing that has
breath is safe from the crocodile. An
egg and a baby alligator would, there
fore, be curious commentaries upon the
after-life of the dangerous amphibian,
and might in themselves teach at a
glance whole page of natural history.
London Telegraph.