304 The Animal-Lore of ShaJcspeare’s Time. 
a fish. It is strange that, as this reptile was an inhabitant 
of a country so well known as Egypt, its manners and 
customs are not more correctly described. Probably the 
terror it inspired, added to the difficulty which the 
natives must have had in its destruction, may have given 
rise to the fanciful accounts that have been handed down 
from antiquity. The explorers of Elizabeth’s time, how¬ 
ever,'brought back more accurate descriptions and probably 
several specimens. Job Hortop, a sailor in the crew of 
Sir John Hawkins, 1591, thus describes the capture and 
attempted preservation of a legarto, or alligator :— 
“ He was twenty three feet by the rule, headed like a hog, in body 
like a serpent, full of scales as broad as a saucer, his tail long and full 
©f knots as big as a f falcon shot.’ He had four legs; his feet had long 
nails like- unto a dragon; we opened him, flayed him, dried his skin, 
and stuffed it with straw, meaning to have brought it home, had not the 
ship been cast away.” (Hakluyt's Voyages .) 
But for the mischance of the wreck this specimen might 
have graced the shop of some needy apothecary in Fleet 
Street. 
A Portuguese traveller, in his account of the southern 
coast of Africa, says:— 
“ The crocodile is five and twentie spans long, and thicker then a 
man; they are cowardly on land, cruell in the water, greene with darke 
yellow spots, and gray, and blacke; they have many rowes of teeth, 
no tongue. The Caffres call them goma” ( Purchas , vol. ii. p. 1547.) 
Marco Polo’s description of the crocodile is too grotesque 
to be omitted. In his travels in the East, towards the 
end of the thirteenth century, he tells us :— 
“ Here are seen huge serpents, ten paces in length, and ten spans in 
the girt of the body. At the fore-part, near the head they have two 
short legs, having three claws like those of a tiger, with eyes larger 
than a fourpenny loaf, and very glaring. The jaws are wide enough to 
swallow a man, the teeth are large and sharp, and their whole appear¬ 
ance is so formidable, that neither man, nor any kind of animal, can 
approach them without terror.” 
