Alligator
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Alligator. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a huge reptilian, closely allied to the crocodile. Alligators are at home in the rivers and lagoons of the Southern States from Texas to North Carolina . They have the general shape of lizards, but are more closely related to turtles and serpents. They attain a length of eight to sixteen feet--Old Mose, in New York Zoological Park, is twelve feet, five inches long. Alligators have bony plates set in their leathery hides. Their legs are large and strong. Their jaws are armed with terrific teeth, and close with a kind of lock which prevents their letting go their prey once they have seized it. Stories are told of alligators lying in wait along the margins of ponds to seize animals coming down to drink, even calves, dogs, or possibly children. They steal up under water fowl and dart into a shoal of fish, snapping their huge jaws. The female alligator builds a low nest of soil and muck, two feet high and four feet in diameter, on some hot, swampy beach. She lays from twenty to one hundred eggs, all in a single night, and covers them up in the nest with sand. The eggs are covered with hard shells, and are a little larger than those of a mallard duck. She then leaves her eggs to hatch in the heat of the sun, but she hovers about until her young appear. They are lively little fellows about eight inches long, weighing eight or nine to the pound. They make for the water at once. The young gain about a foot in length each year, or about twelve feet in ten years. As winter approaches, alligators bury themselves in mud banks to sleep. They do not freeze, but may be dug out in the winter without signs of life. A few hours in the sun, however, will bring them into activity. A few years ago, tourists amused themselves shooting alligators from the decks of Florida steamers, but the high prices paid for the hides by the makers of alligator trunks, valises, and hand bags, led to their wholesale slaughter by hunters, until a traveler may now count himself fortunate if he catches sight of one. A smaller alligator, six feet in length, lives in the Yang-tse-Kiang of China. William T. Hornaday says of a specimen in his possession: "It so closely resembles our American species, that specific differences are difficult to point out." The Chinese alligator is of a greenish-black color, dotted over with yellow spots. Alligators differ from true crocodiles in having cavities in the upper jaw for the reception of the long fourth teeth of the lower jaw. Their feet are not completely webbed, and they live much in marshes and swamps. They are most active at night, when they make loud bellowing noises. They feed chiefly on fish. See Crocodile ; Gavial
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a genus of reptiles belonging to the family alligatoridæ and order crocodilia. The alligator is known from its nearest the crocodiles and gavials, by having the head de pressed and the canine teeth of the lower jaw received in a pit in the upper. The hind feet are never completely webbed, and sometimes there is scarcely any membrane. The best known species is alligatoridæ mississippiensis, the alligator of the Mississippi river. It is 15 or 18 feet, or even more, in length.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's warned in 1910 that hide-hunters for "trunks, valises, and hand bags" had so thinned the American alligator that "a traveler may now count himself fortunate if he catches sight of one" — a prediction that nearly came true, and the species was among the first protected under the Endangered Species Act of 1973. It was declared fully recovered and delisted in 1987, and Florida and Louisiana now hold well over a million wild alligators between them, managed by nuisance-alligator programs and licensed harvests. Two claims have simply been overturned: alligators are not "more closely related to turtles and serpents" but are archosaurs, whose nearest living relatives are birds, and the female does not simply leave her eggs "to hatch in the heat of the sun" — she builds a mound of rotting vegetation, guards it, opens it at hatching and carries the young to water. Biologists also learned in the 1980s that the nest temperature, not chromosomes, decides whether the hatchlings are male or female. The Chinese alligator that Aiton's mentions as a curiosity has gone the other way: it is now critically endangered, with only a small wild population left in Anhui province.
Written for this edition, 2026.