The alligator is an American crocodile.[71] The order crocodilia, which includes the gavial of India, the true crocodile of the Nile, the cayman of the Orinoco region, and the American alligator, is plentiful in Florida and some of our other Southern States, and takes its scientific name from the Mississippi River,[72] one of its favorite homes. The name alligator is of Spanish origin, _el lagarto_, the lizard, and was given by the early Spanish explorers of our Southern States because this was the greatest lizard they had ever seen. This American crocodile, the alligator, is one of the best-known creatures in the world. Being easily caught, and easily reared, it is seen in the cheapest shows, museums, and menageries, and in many public aquariums and zoological gardens. For my own part I never felt a deeper sympathy with any wretched beast than I did with a pair of alligators in the Brighton Aquarium, England. Lying in a grotto, where all that could be done in the way of providing them with a few inches of water, and a certain amount of damp heat had been done to testify to the general good will of their keepers, were those miserable exiles from their hot, native lagoons. I fancied that among the mists and raw cold of “John Bull’s tight little island” these creatures longed, as I did, for the vivid blaze of a southern sun. While an alligator basking on a log in hot sunshine, deep water close at hand to slip into for safety, is a picture of intense lazy enjoyment, an alligator blinking at an electric light in an aquarium, a chilly beast stretched upon wet stones, seems in his stillness a picture of apathetic misery. I doubt if either of the beasts in the aquarium could have roused to enough interest in life to snap at its favorite food, a puppy, had one ventured near. They did not even show appreciation of the fact that a person like myself, with a toleration for dog-days, and a hearty longing for palmettoes, trumpet-creepers, magnolias, and red-birds, was looking at them with sympathy and a gleam of kindness!