Capture and Death of a large Alligator. 319 
legs entire, torn off at the hannch and shoulder, which he had 
swallowed whole, besides a large quantity of stones, some of 
them of several pounds weight. 
The night, which had become very dark and stormy, prevented 
us from being minute in our investigation ; and leaving direc- 
tions to preserve the bones and skin, we took the head with us 
and returned home. This precaution was induced by the anxiety 
of the natives to secure the teeth; and I afterwards found that 
they attribute to them miraculous powers in the cure or preven- 
tion of diseases. 
The head weighed near three hundred tag al so well 
was it covered with flesh and muscle, that we found balls quite 
flattened which had been discharged into the mouth and at the 
back of the head, at only the distance of a few fect, and yet the 
bones had not a single mark to show that they had been touched. 
I would observe, ‘that the head, as it now appears, conveys a 
feeble impression of its size before it was divested of its integu- 
ments. 
I returned shortly after to Manilla, and expected to have been 
followed by the bones and skin of the alligator. They were 
drying on a scaffold, near the place where he was killed, when a 
typhon, or hurricane, of unexampled severity, which laid low the 
cabin of the Indian and the tree of the forest, and covered the 
shores of the lake with the bodies of man, and beast, and fish, 
swept away the platform and whirled into the lake or the jungle, 
every fragment of our victim. 
The head was an object of great curiosity at Manilla, nothing 
of similar size having been seen there ; and on a visit which I 
subsequently made to Europe, I examined, with some attention, 
the museums of natural history, particularly those of France and 
England, without finding any thing of equal magnitude. 
While the head was at Manilla, an English frigate arrived there 
that had been long on the East India station. The officers had, 
at Ceylon, killed an alligator of extraordinary size, the skeleton 
of which they intended to send to the British Museum. They 
expressed however their disinclination to do so, after seeing that 
ftom Halahala, which was much larger than the one they had 
taken. 
In comparing notes with them respecting the nature and habits 
of this animal, I was struck with the similarity of the supersti- 
