The same traveller relates an interesting example of the Cayman’s tenacity of life. One of them having been wounded with a strong harpoon, was dragged upon a sand-bank. Here the rays of the sun seemed to infuse new life into the monster, for, awakening from his death-like torpidity, he suddenly snapped about him with such rage that Schomburgk and his assistants thought it prudent to retreat to a safer distance. Seizing a long and mighty pole, the bravest of the Indians now went towards the Cayman, who awaited the attack with wide-extended jaws, and plunged the stake deep into his maw--a morsel which the brute did not seem to relish. Meanwhile two other Indians approached him from behind, and kept striking him with thick clubs upon the extremity of the tail. At every blow upon this sensitive part, the monster bounded in the air and extended his frightful jaws, which were each time immediately regaled with a fresh thrust of the pole. After a long and furious battle, the Cayman, who measured twelve feet in length, was at last slain. Another remarkable instance of the vitality of the common crocodile is mentioned by Sir E. Tennent. A gentleman at Galle having caught on a baited hook an unusually large one, it was disembowelled by his coolies, the aperture in the stomach being left expanded by a stick placed across it. On returning, in the afternoon, with a view to secure the head, they found that the creature had crawled for some distance, and made its escape into the water. We all know the intense hatred which sailors bear to the shark, and with what savage delight they drag one on board, and hack him to pieces with their knives before life is extinct; but the American Indian is a no less inveterate enemy of the Cayman, and, when occasion offers, lets him feel the full extent of his inventive cruelty. Among the Javanese, on the contrary, we find the crocodile considered as a sacred animal, on account of his clearing the rivers and lagunes of putrefying substances; and the friendship even seems to be reciprocal, as Bennett saw Javanese convicts busy working up to their middle in water, quite near the monsters. Like the sea-turtles, the crocodiles generally deposit their eggs, which are about the size of those of a goose, and covered with a calcareous shell, in holes made in the sand, leaving them to be hatched by the warm rays of the tropical sun. In some parts of America, however, they have been observed to resort to a more ingenious method, denoting a degree of provident instinct which could hardly have been expected in a cold-blooded reptile. Raising a small hillock on the banks of the river, and hollowing it out in the middle, they collect a quantity of leaves and other vegetable matters, in which they deposit their eggs. These are covered with the leaves, and are hatched by the heat extricated during their putrefaction, along with that of the atmosphere.