306 
The Animal-Lore of ShaJcspeare’s Time . 
abundantly furnished with passing variety of pleasant fine waters and 
apothecary drugges that serve onely for the monkes. In the first of 
these roomes I saw the skin of a great crocodile hanged up at the roofe, 
and another skinne of a crocodile in the inner roome. This crocodile 
is a beast of a most terrible shape, fashioned like a dragon, with 
wonderful! hard scales upon his backe; I observed that he hath no 
tongue at all; his eyes are very little, and his teeth long and sharp ” 
{Coryat’s Crudities , vol. i. p. 181, ed. 1776.) 
Reference is often made to the notion, handed down 
from antiquity, that the crocodile attracted its victims 
by affected weeping. Spenser writes :— 
“ As when a wearie traveller, that strayes 
By muddy shore of broad seven-moutlied Nile, 
Unweeting of the perilous wandring wayes. 
Both meete a cruell craftie crocodile, 
'Which, in false griefe hyding his harmefull guile, 
Doth weepe full sore, and sheddeth tender teares; 
The foolish man, that pities all this while 
His mournfull plight, is swallowed up unwares; 
Forgetful! of his owne, that mindes another’s cares.” 
{Faerie Queene, I. v. 18.) 
Othello exclaims, when JDesdemona weeps:— 
“ 0 devil, devil! 
If that the earth could teem with woman’s tears. 
Each drop she falls would prove a crocodile.” 
{Othello , iv. 1, 256.) 
Dr. Andrew Wilson has recently explained the belief 
in crocodile’s tears as originating from the loud and 
singularly plaintive cries the creature emits, not unlike 
the mournful howling of a dog :— 
“ The earlier travellers would very naturally associate tears with 
these cries, and once begun, the supposition would be readily pro¬ 
pagated, for error and myth are ever plants of quick growth. The 
belief in the movement of the upper jaw rests on an apparent basis of 
fact. The lower jaw is joined to the skull very far back on the latter, 
and the mouth-opening thus comes to be singularly wide ; whilst, when 
the mouth opens, the skull and upper jaw are apparently observed to 
move. This is not the case, however ; the apparent movement arising 
