CROCODILE. 
47 
ful ; but at last he was so severely wounded in one 
of these combats, that he must have perished if he 
had not been assisted by some of his companions. 
It is not usual for the crocodile to attack man- 
kind unless when pressed by hunger ; when they 
sometimes become furious, and will brave any dan- 
ger to satisfy their appetite. Children on the banks 
of the Nile have frequently been destroyed by these 
terrible animals, and Hasselquist relates, that in 
Upper Egypt they often devour the women who 
come to the banks of the river for water. They 
generally secure their prey by sweeping it off the 
banks with their tail, and then dragging it to the 
bottom. It sometimes happens that the wounded 
creature the monster has thus surprised escapes 
from his grasp, and endeavours to save itself by 
flight, but the crocodile immediately pursues and 
frequently overtakes his prey, which is then dragged 
back to the river and inevitably destroyed. The 
crocodile can run tolerably fast upon level ground 
and in a straight direction ; but the time he takes 
to turn himself round gives a person a fair chance 
to escape : accordingly we are told of an English- 
man who was pursued so quickly by a large croco- 
dile, which came out of the lake Nicaragua, that 
unless the Spaniards who were in his company had 
cried out for him to quit the straight road, and run 
in a circle, he must have been caught. 
We learn from the information of M. de la 
Borde, that in the spring the female crocodile of 
South America prepares a small hillock of sand, by 
