FOSSIL REPTILES. 177 



Nevertheless, the Romans, and the Greeks who lived under 

 their dominion, availed themselves of all these opportunities of 

 seeing the crocodile, only for the purpose of giving some exact- 

 ness to their figures of this animal. It is certainly very well repre- 

 sented on their medals and monuments. The mosaic of Pales- 

 trina, the plinthus of the statue of the Nile, various medals of 

 the different emperors^ and sundry engraved stones, clearly prove 

 that the artists were sufficiently familiarized with the external 

 conformation of the crocodile. But we have no reason to be- 

 lieve that any of the ancient naturalists recognized more than 

 one species. The fact that some of them have spoken of a 

 crocodile called suchus or suchis, does not, as we shall have 

 reason to observe hereafter, invalidate this assertion. 



Nor shall we find that even the moderns themselves, before 

 the attention of M. Cuvier was drawn to the subject, have car- 

 ried their exacter modes of observation and arrangement in 

 natural history into this department of the animal kingdom. 

 The most enlightened naturalists of the eighteenth century 

 have confounded together, contrary to all rules, distinct species 

 of the crocodile, and mixed with them certain of the larger 

 lizards, which have no claims to such an arrangement. Thus, 

 Linnaeus, in the editions of the Systema Natures, published 

 during his own life, admitted only a single crocodile, without 

 even distinguishing the species of the Ganges with elongated 

 beak. His contemporary Gronovius separated from the cro- 

 codile, properly so called, the cayman, or American crocodile, 

 the crocodile of the Ganges, (to which last he joined the black 

 crocodile of Adanson,) and a fourth species which he named 

 the crocodile of Ceylon, and which he distinguished by this 

 accidental character, and one peculiar only to the individual 

 which he described, namely, that the two external toes only are 

 completely palmated. Laurenti has established two particular 

 species besides the crocodile and the cayman, founded upon 

 indifferent figures from Seba, (Crocodilus Africanus et C. ter- 

 restris,) but he has totally forgotten the gavial and the black 



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