Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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He Frequently Wanders To The Distance
Of A League From The Rio Cauto And The Marshy Coast Of Xagua To Devour
The Pigs On The Islands.
This animal is sometimes fifteen feet long,
and will, it is said, pursue a man on horseback, like the wolves in
Europe; while the animals exclusively called caymans at Batabano are
so timid that people bathe without apprehension in places where they
live in bands.
These peculiarities, and the name of cocodrilo, given
at the island of Cuba, to the most dangerous of the carnivorous
reptiles, appear to me to indicate a different species from the great
animals of the Orinoco, Rio Magdalena and Saint Domingo. In other
parts of the Spanish American continent the settlers, deceived by the
exaggerated accounts of the ferocity of crocodiles in Egypt, allege
that the real crocodile is only found in the Nile. Zoologists have,
however, ascertained that there are in America caymans or alligators
with obtuse snouts, and legs not indented, and crocodiles with pointed
snouts and indented legs; and in the old continent, both crocodiles
and gaviales. The Crocodilus acutus of San Domingo, in which I cannot
hitherto specifically distinguish the crocodiles of the great rivers
of the Orinoco and the Magdalena, has, according to Cuvier, so great a
resemblance to the crocodile of the Nile,* that it required a minute
examination to prove that the rule laid down by Buffon relative to the
distribution of species between the tropical regions of the two
continents was correct.
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