THE CROCODILIANS 77 



As he left terra-firma, an almost involuntary inclination 

 caused him to hurl his body away from a pair of widely- 

 gaping, tooth-studded jaws swinging perilously near. 

 Landing with a thud on one shoulder, though otherwise 

 unhurt, the writer threw himself over and over, rolling 

 from the dangerous brute that was actually pursuing 

 him on the run, body raised high from the ground. 

 For an instant it seemed as if the crocodile would win. 

 As the writer suddenly sprang to his feet and glanced 

 backward, he beheld the brute throw itself fiat on its 

 beUy, open the jaws widelj^ then remain motionless as 

 a statue. Such is the average crocodile — an active, 

 vicious and, above all, treacherous brute. When the 

 keepers of the reptile house in the New York Zoological 

 Park clean out the big j)ool for crocodilians, they actu- 

 ally walk over the backs of some of the big 'gators, so 

 tame are these. They never become undulj^ familiar 

 with the crocodiles, finding it necessary to pen the latter 

 behind heavy barred gates — and in the process the men 

 are often chased from the enclosure. 



The African Crocodile, C. niloticus, often called 

 the Nile Crocodile, is generally abundant throughout 

 Africa from the Nile to the Senegal, thence southward 

 to the Cape of Good Hope. It also swarms in the in- 

 land rivers of Madagascar. None among the legions 

 of wild brutes of the Dark Continent has caused greater 

 loss of human life than the present terrible creature. 

 And it is consequently no wonder this ponderous, vicious 

 reptile has been notorious from ancient times down to 

 the present. It was held sacred by the ancient Egypt- 

 ians who preserved thousands of mummies of various- 

 sized reptiles. Now^ the crocodile is nearly extinct in 

 lower Egypt, though it swarms farther up the Nile. 



Except from its man-eating habits j the African Ci'oco- 



