THE CAYMAN. 421 



and a. modern writer might well have spared the recital of his feats in this way 

 upon the cayman of Guiana, had he not been influenced, in this and numberless 

 other instances, by the greatest possible love of the marvellous, and a constant 

 propensity to dress truth in the garb of fiction." Extract from " Lardner's Cabinet 

 Cyclopedia;" Fishes, vol. ii., p. ill. 



SWAINSON, wholesale dealer in closet-zoology, was never in the wilds 

 of Guiana, where the book of " Wanderings " was written. Hence 

 any comment on the above extract were loss of labour and of time. 

 His erroneous account of the cayman at once shows me that he never 

 saw this animal in its native haunts. 



I stop not here to tell the world how I came to incur the hostility 

 of this morbid and presumptuous man. Suffice it to say, that for- 

 merly, in friendship (for I personally knew his worthy father), I used 

 to give him ornithological information. But his behaviour was such 

 that I found myself under the absolute necessity of discontinuing my 

 correspondence with him; and this laid the foundation of that ani- 

 mosity which at last has induced him publicly to call in question my 

 veracity, without fortifying his rash act with any proof whatever. Let 

 me here inform this dealer in unsound zoology, that my veracity is 

 the only article upon which I feel that I have a positive right to plume 

 myself in the two small volumes which I have presented to the world. 

 And now for the cayman first apologising to the reader for this dis- 

 agreeable though necessary prologue. 



Those who have had no opportunity of examining the crocodile 

 and cayman in the regions where they are found, may form a toler- 

 ably correct notion of them (making a due allowance for size) by an 

 inspection of the little lizard which inhabits the warmer parts of 

 Europe. And should they not have it in their power to travel out of 

 England, they may still acquire a competent idea of these animals 

 by looking at the newt, which is common in most of our gardens ; 

 for, notwithstanding the frivolous objections which Swainson has 

 offered to the contrary, I consider these monsters of tropical climates 

 neither more nor less than lizards of an extraordinary size, 'and in this 

 the Spaniards agree with me ; for, on their first arrival in the New 

 World, seeing that the cayman was an overgrown lizard, both in form 

 and habits, they called it una lagarta, which is the Spanish name 

 for a lizard. The British, in course of time, having seized on the 



