114 NOTES OF A BOTANIST 
some were starved, others drowned, and not a few 
of the younger ones fell victims to alligators, thus 
rendering our supply of beef as precarious as that 
of milk. I was told, but cannot vouch for the fact, 
that those rapacious monsters (the alligators) thread 
their way in the water, concealed by the gigantic 
marsh -grasses, and thus approach unperceived 
their unconscious victims, whom they first stun with 
a blow of their tail and then speedily crush in their 
enormous jaws. 
About the same time there was a great mortality 
— a sort of murrain — among the alligators in lakes 
lying to north of the Amazon, a day's journey 
from Santarem ; but it fell short of what Captain 
Hislop recounted to me as having occurred many 
years before, when it was computed that no fewer 
than a thousand alligators died in the Tapajoz, and 
floated down to Santarem, where so great was the 
stench of their decomposing carcasses that the 
principal merchants had all their boats and men 
employed for some weeks in towing them down the 
river to a safe distance below the town. 
When the waters were at their highest, I visited 
the meadows of the Ponta Negra, principally with 
the object of procuring seeds of the Victoria. It 
grew there in two small lakes, to attain which we 
had to push our canoe through a thick grove of 
grasses, which stood out of the water to a height of 
from 2 to 5 feet, besides having at least an equal 
length of stem buried in water and mud. These 
grasses formed an elegant fringe, with their nodding 
plumes of purple-and-green flowers, to the little 
round lakes, in each of which grew a single plant of 
the Victoria, each plant with a single flower rising 
