Tortoises and Turtles 



559 



Turtles. 



Certain of the Terrapins, or Water-tortoises, belonging to the groups above described 

 frequent saline river-estuaries and salt marshes, but none are strictly marine. With the 

 Turtle Family, however, we arrive at an exclusively pelagic section, in which the animals 

 are specially adapted for life in the high seas, the walking-limbs of the terrestrial and 

 fresh-water species being rejilaced by long and powerful swimming-flippers. The shell in 

 these marine Chelonians is more or less heart-shaped and flattened, and the carapace and 

 plastron are always separate, and never united in a rigid box-like form, as with the Land- 

 tortoises. In common with those fresh-water tortoises which pass the greater portion of 

 their existence in lakes or rivers, the Marine Turtles resort to the land to deposit their 

 eggs. The locations chosen are the sand-beaches or isolated sandy islets in tropical oceans, 

 wherein, after excavating hollows to receive them, the eggs are covered up and left to 



SNAPPING-TDRTLE. 

 Also known as the Alligator-terrapin, with reference to its long, alligator-like tail. 



hatch with the heat of the sun. The eggs of turtles differ from those of the Land-tortoises 

 and Terrapins in that their external covering is soft or leathery. So soon as the young 

 turtles are hatched, they emerge from the sand, and instinctively make their way to the 

 water. Many, however, are the perils that beset their course, and few there be out of 

 perhaps 80 or 100 turtlets which gain the shore and get through into deep water. Fish- 

 hawks and sea-birds of every description are waiting ready to pounce down upon them 

 immediately they make their appearance, or to thin their ranks as they run the gauntlet of 

 perhaps 100 yards or so to reach the sea m safety. Even at the waters edge the ordeal is 

 by no means passed. Shoals of the smaller sharks and other predatory fish are continually 

 cruising round in the shallow water, and have as high an appreciation of the toothsomeness 

 of tender turtle as the proverbial London alderman. The writer was fortunate on one 

 occasion, among the coral islands on the Australian coasts, to light upon a young tuitle brood 



