The term serpent is applied by many old writers to crocodiles and the like, e.g. by Odoric, and perhaps allusively by Shakspeare ("Where’s my Serpent of Old Nile?").  Mr. Fergusson tells me he was once much struck with the snake-like motion of a group of crocodiles hastily descending to the water from a high sand-bank, without apparent use of the limbs, when surprised by the approach of a boat.[2]

Matthioli says the gall of the crocodile surpasses all medicines for the removal of pustules and the like from the eyes.  Vincent of Beauvais mentions the same, besides many other medical uses of the reptile’s carcass, including a very unsavoury cosmetic. (Matt. p. 245; Spec.  Natur. Lib.  XVII. c. 106, 108.)

["According to Chinese notions, Han Yue, the St. Patrick of China, having persuaded the alligators in China that he was all-powerful, induced the stupid saurians to migrate to Ngo Hu or ‘Alligators’ Lake’ in the Kwang-tung province.” (North-China Herald, 5th July, 1895, p. 5.)

Alligators have been found in 1878 at Wu-hu and at Chen-kiang (Ngan-hwei and Kiang-Su). (See A.  A. Fauvel, Alligators in China, in Jour.  N. China B.R.A.S. XIII. 1879, 1-36.)—­H.C.]

NOTE 4.—­I think the great horses must be an error, though running through all the texts, and that grant quantite de chevaus was probably intended.  Valuable ponies are produced in those regions, but I have never heard of large horses, and Martini’s testimony is to like effect (p. 141).  Nor can I hear of any race in those regions in modern times that uses what we should call long stirrups.  It is true that the Tartars rode very short—­“brevissimas habent strepas," as Carpini says (643); and the Kirghiz Kazaks now do the same.  Both Burmese and Shans ride what we should call short; and Major Sladen observes of the people on the western border of Yun-nan:  “Kachyens and Shans ride on ordinary Chinese saddles.  The stirrups are of the usual average length, but the saddles are so constructed as to rise at least a foot above the pony’s back.”  He adds with reference to another point in the text:  “I noticed a few Shan ponies with docked tails.  But the more general practice is to loop up the tail in a knot, the object being to protect the rider, or rather his clothes, from the dirt with which they would otherwise be spattered from the flipping of the animal’s tail.” (MS. Notes.)

[After Yung-ch’ang, Captain Gill writes (II. p. 356):  “The manes were hogged and the tails cropped of a great many of the ponies these men were riding; but there were none of the docked tails mentioned by Marco Polo.”—­H.C.]

Armour of boiled leather—­“armes cuiraces de cuir bouilli”; so Pauthier’s text; the material so often mentioned in mediaeval costume; e.g. in the leggings of Sir Thopas:—­

  “His jambeux were of cuirbouly,
   His swerdes sheth of ivory,
     His helme of latoun bright.”