Crocodiles may grow to a length of 18 and probably 20 feet or more, and are powerful creatures, which are the pests of the waters they frequent, seizing and dragging down women and men who come to draw water, and gripping by the nose cattle and other animals which come to drink. A beast thus seized has little chance of escape, no matter what may be its size, as it is taken at a disadvantage and rendered comparatively helpless; but there is a well-authenticated story of a Nile crocodile seizing a rhinoceros by one of the hind-legs just as it was about to leave the river, and eventually dragging the enormous beast, despite its frantic efforts, backwards into deep water, where it was drowned. The prey is, indeed, always killed by drowning, after which the carcase is dragged ashore and concealed among reeds or other covert, where it is left until decomposition has set in before being devoured. A large proportion of the food of the Nile crocodile is stated, however, to consist of fish; and snails, water-fowl, and carrion are also devoured by these ravenous reptiles. When in repose, crocodiles lie like logs in the water, or on the neighbouring sand and mud banks, but the slightest sound awakens them to activity. Hearing seems indeed to be the sense most strongly developed in crocodiles; and it is upon this that they depend in ascertaining the presence of prey. Smell, touch, and taste appear to be but poorly developed; and the tongue is affixed to the lower surface of the mouth throughout its entire length. Crocodiles are furnished with glands secreting a musky substance, much esteemed by the Sudanis for anointing their hair and bodies, and thus producing what is to them, no doubt, an agreeable odour. All crocodiles lay hard-shelled, oval eggs, about the size of those of a goose. These are deposited by the female, to the number of from about twenty to ninety, a yard or so deep in the sand of the river-bank, where they are carefully covered up by means of her tail, and then left to mature by the action of the sun’s rays. The mother appears, however, to keep watch in the neighbourhood of the nest, and when the eggs are ready to hatch, their occupants utter a peculiar sound which attracts the parent to their assistance. THE WHITE-HANDED GIBBON (_Hylobates lar_) The name gibbon, which is of unknown origin, and appears to have been first used by the French naturalist Buffon, is applied to the members of the smallest representatives of the man-like apes, all of which differ from their larger cousins, the chimpanzi, gorilla, and orang-utan, by retaining small bare patches on the buttocks. In this respect they show evidence of kinship to ordinary monkeys and baboons, in which, however, these naked callosities, as they are called by naturalists, attain much greater development.