As the season for incubation approaches, the female searches for a sandy spot, and digging a hole with her fore-feet, deposits there her eggs, which are somewhat smaller than those of a goose. They are usually placed in layers, carefully covered up in the sand, and if not disturbed by wild animals, are hatched by the heat of the sun. It frequently happens that the alligator cannot find a sand-bank in which to place her eggs, and on such occasions she scrapes together with her fore-feet grass, leaves, bark, and sticks, mixed with mud, and converting the whole into a low platform, deposits the eggs upon it in separate layers, each layer being sandwiched with the mixture of mud, sticks, &c., until more than one hundred white eggs, of a faint green tint, are carefully stowed away in the nest. The exterior of the nest, which has a mound-like character, is daubed over with mud, the tail of the alligator being used as a trowel. The first duties of maternity being over, the female alligator acts as policeman until the eggs are hatched. Her office is not a sinecure, for the fowls of the air, and the creeping things upon earth, are attracted to the entombed delicacies secreted in this oven-like structure in the swamp. Many a luckless coon and cracker's pig searching for a breakfast, receive instead a blow from the strong tail of the female alligator, and are swept into the grasp of her terrible and relentless jaws. Moisture and heat act their parts in assisting the process of incubation, and the little alligators, a few inches in length, issue from the shell, and are welcomed by their mail-clad mother into the new world. Like young turtles just from the shell, the baby alligators make for the water, but unlike the young of the sea-turtles, the saurians have the assistance of their parent, who not unfrequently takes a load of them upon her back. From the first inception of nest-building until the young are able to take care of themselves, this reptile mother, like the female wild-turkey, resists the encroachments of her mate who would devour, not only the eggs, but his own crawling children. In fact, if opportunity were offered by the absence of the mother from the nest and the young, his alligatorship would eat up all his progeny, and exterminate his species, without a particle of regret. He has no pride in the perpetuation of his family, and it is to the maternal instincts of his good wife that we owe the preservation of the alligator.