208 AUSTKAI.IAN CROCODILES 



configuration of its snout we may safely conclude that its chief 

 if not its only food is fishes. As a species it is much less 

 numerically abundant that C. porosus, nevertheless it is said to 

 be plentiful in certain restricted districts. 



Whether as to dimensions, distribution, or ferocity the case 

 is widely different as regards the short-snouted Crocodile, which 

 when adult averages a length of eighteen feet ; it grows, 

 however, to a much larger size, a specimen, the skull of which 

 is in the South Kensington Museum, London, having been 

 recorded from Bawisaul in the Bengal Presidency, which 

 measured when killed no less than thirty-three feet. 



Its range also is very extensive and forms a marked 

 contrast with that of Johnston's Crocodile, as it is found in all 

 the estuaries and along the coast line of Northern Australia, 

 New Guinea, the Solomon and the Fiji Islands, and westward 

 throughout Malaysia to Burma, Southern China, the east coast 

 of India, and Ceylon. 



That the southern range of this crocodile on the mainland 

 of Australia is gradually but surely being pushed northwards, 

 seems from facts to which reference will hereafter be made> 

 incontrovertible, and is in direct variance with the contentions 

 of Indian zoologists, who hold chat it is an immigrant from the 

 west to our shores. Judging from analogous cases we should 

 have expected, were this contention correct, that it would have 

 spread from the common centre, which these authors take to be 

 the east coast of India, equally as far to the westward as to the 

 eastward ; but this is not the case, since this species does not 

 inhabit the west coast of the great peninsula. It is, therefore, 

 necesary to look elsewhere for the metropolis and original birth 

 place of the Estuary Crocodile, and these, in the author's 

 opinion, are naturally to be found in the Malaysian subregion, 

 among the many islands of which it acquired its partiality for 

 an estuarine and even marine existence, and from whence, 

 owing to this peculiarity, it was able to extend its 

 range in every direction, even to the successful 

 colonisation of such distant islands as those of the Fijian group, 

 after having successfully negotiated a journey which must have 

 proved fatal to the majority of related species. Nor does the 

 fact of its greater extension in an eastern direction from the 

 proposed centre of origin militate against this theory, since such 

 increased extension is doubtless due to the lack of competition 

 in that direction. To sum up then — from the centre indicated 



