HIPPOPOTAJIUS, OR RIVER HORSE. 
731 
Dampier. It was reported to M. Hasselquist, that he is an inveterate 
enemy to the crocodile, and kills it whenever he meets it, and that 
this, wi-h some other causes, contributes much to the extirpation of 
the crocodile, which otherwise, considering the many eggs they lay, 
would utterly destroy Egypt. But Mr. Pennant treats the alleged- 
enmity of the hippopotamus and crocodile as a vulgar error; an eye- 
witness declaring he had seen them swimming together without any 
disagreement. The hippopotami sleep in the reedy islands in the 
middle of the stream, and on these they bring forth their youyg. A 
herd of females has but a single male ; they bring one young at a 
time, and that on the land, but suckle it in the water. They are 
capable of being tamed. Belon says, he had seen one so gentle 
as to be let loose out of its stable, and to be fed by its keeper, with- 
out attempting to injure any one. They are generally taken in pit- 
falls, and the poor people eat the flesh. In some places the natives 
place boards full of sharp irons in the corn grounds ; which these 
beasts strike into their feet, and so become an easy prey. Sometimes 
they are struck in the water with harpoons fastened to cords, and ten 
or twelve canoes are employed in the chase. 
The hippopotamus was known to the Romans. Scaurus treated the 
people with the sight of five crocodiles and one hippopotamus, during 
his tedileship, and exhibited them in a temporary lake. Augustus 
produced one at his triumph over Cleopatra. This animal is the 
behemoth of Job; who admirably describes its manners, its food, 
and its haunts, chap. x. verse 15 — 24. Ver. fifteen, the learned Bochart 
observes, implies the locality of its situation ; being an inhabitant 
of the Nile, in the neighbourhood of Uz, the land of Job. The 
sixteenth describes its great strength, and the eighteenth the pecu- 
liar hardness of its bones. The twenty-first and twenty-second indi- 
cate its residence amidst the Nile and other African rivers, shadowed 
with thick forests ; the twenty-third, the characteristic wideness of its 
mouth, which is hyperbolicaily described as large enough to exhaust 
the Jordan. An entertaining account of the hippopotamus is given 
in Sparrman’s Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, where these animals 
are called sea-cows. After giving a particular narrative of a hunt- 
ing expedition for two days, upon which he and Mr. Immeluian had 
set out, on the twenty-fourth of January, 1776, accompanied by 
other three Europeans and two Hottentots, and wherein he himself 
was once in imminent danger of his life from one of these animals, 
Mr. Sparrman proceeds as follows : — 
“ The same night, the twenty- sixth, we betook ourselves again to 
our posts, and at half after eight, it being already very dark, a sea- 
cow began at intervals to put its head above the water, and utter a 
sharp, piercing, and very angry cry, which seemed to be between 
grunting and neighing. Perhaps this cry may be best expressed in 
the words, hurhh — hurkh, huch-huch ; the two first being uttered slowly 
in a hoarse but sharp and tremulous cry, resembling the grunting of 
other animals ; while the third, or compound word, is sounded ex- 
tremely quick, and is not unlike the neighing of a horse. It is true, 
it is impossible to express these inarticulate sounds in writing, but 
perhaps one may make nearer approaches to it than to the gutturo- 
