30 CLASS REPTILIA. 



and left dry, where earth and water appear to contend for unde- 

 fined possessions ; the masses of aquatic herbage, which are 

 cast on the undecided confines of those belligerent elements, 

 are peopled only by unclean animals, which swarm in those 

 revolting haunts, the very cloaca of nature, where every 

 thing retraces the image of those monstrous births which 

 mythological poetry has fabled to have sprung from the slime 

 of the ancient earth, on the recession of the waters of the 

 deluge. Enormous serpents trailing their slow length along, 

 impress the miry soil with broad and indented furrows ; cro- 

 codiles, toads, lizards, and a thousand other reptiles, knead 

 with broad feet the yielding clay. Millions of insects, 

 developed by the humid heat, rise in dense masses from their 

 muddy cradle, obscuring the atmosphere with their clouds, 

 and deafening the ear with their hummings. All this impure 

 population of creeping, or of winged vermin, attracts in 

 numerous cohorts the birds of prey, whose piercing cries, 

 mingled with the hoarse croakings of their reptile victims, 

 breaking the awful silence of those frightful deserts, seem to 

 interdict the approach of every other living being. Regions 

 like these, impracticable and unformed, recal our imagination 

 to chaotic ages, ere the elements were yet separated, when 

 earth and water made but one common mass, and the living 

 tribes had not yet received their allocation in the different 

 districts of nature.*" 



It is amid these masses of aquatic vegetation that the alli- 

 gator lies concealed in ambush for his imsuspecting prey. It 

 is in these impure marshes that the tortoise buries itself 

 - — that serpents devour each other — that large and hideous 

 toads withdraw themselves from the light of day, and secrete 

 their venom. Painful it is, without doubt, and disgusting 

 to the mind, to dwell on images like these ; but strange mar- 

 vels are hidden in these gloomy recesses, where the most won- 

 derful operations of nature are proceeding in the very bosom 



