TORTOISES AND TURTLES 
I 6i 
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 replaced 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 Tb'rm, 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 
By permhiion of the New York Zoological Soif 
SNAPPING-TURTLE 
knoixjn.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 8o or lOO 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 lOO yards or so to reach the sea in safety. Even at the water’s 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 turtle brood 
