REPTILES 323 



snake-skin leathers, the tortoise shell of commerce, and the 

 flesh of some of the marine turtles and fresh-water terrapins. 

 Here is a wide, almost new, field, and anyone who will make 

 careful studies of habits and life histories, especially of feeding 

 tests with snakes, lizards, or turtles, and even tests of edibility 

 in case of likely forms, has a good chance of advancing the 

 cause of valuable knowledge and common sense. 



Crocodilia. The warm regions of the world contain nineteen species 

 of big, burly, bony-armored reptiles, with long tails, powerful jaws, and 

 tempers as ugly as their own rough backs. HORNADAY. 



To see a live Alantosaurus immanis 115 feet long said to be the 

 " biggest and bulkiest of all animals " (Gadow) would make us real- 

 ize that our largest 20-foot crocodiles are mere pigmy survivals of the 

 huge reptiles that ruled the world during the Upper Jurassic. Accord- 

 ing to Hornaday only three of the nineteen species are dangerous man- 

 eaters the Malayan salt-water crocodile and two African forms. The 

 two that are natives of America, Crocodilus acutus and Alligator missis- 

 ai/>jtiensis, are not man-hunters. Still, to keep such hulks in food con- 

 sisting of fishes, waterfowl and poultry, pigs, and other animals such as 

 they can catch is expensive and must eventually limit their range to 

 zoological gardens and alligator farms. 



Turtles Chelonia. Senseless waste and even cruelty have too often 

 characterized man's treatment of these defenseless and valuable crea- 

 tures. Their nests have been plundered for the eggs, whose value is 

 slight compared with that of the turtles which they might have pro- 

 duced ; the mother turtles, when they draw out of the sea to lay, have 

 been turned on their backs in numbers that could not be utilized, and 

 most of them left to struggle under the hot sun until they died ; the 

 hawksbill, in some countries, is hung over a slow fire and roasted until 

 the precious shell plates loosen from the bone, when they are stripped 

 off and the turtle is put back into the" water under the probably false 

 idea that it may live to produce another crop of shell. These are some 

 of the abuses that ought to be stopped in the name of humanity. While 

 it may be a far cry to ask savages of cannibal islands to treat sea turtles 

 with humanity, we might, at least, see that turtles of our own coasts are 

 treated in humane and common-sense fashion. They range the tropical 

 and subtropical oceans the world around, but Gadow says that they prob- 

 ably return to the same beaches to lay. Hence, if we protect the turtles 



