text:  There is no great prowess therefore required to ride on the back of a poor cayman after it has been secured or perhaps wounded; and a modern writer might well have spared the recital of his feats in this way upon the cayman of Guiana had he not been influenced in this and numberless other instances by the greatest possible love of the marvellous and a constant propensity to dress truth in the garb of fiction;" and subsequently speaks of the cayman as "so timid that had we been disposed to perform such ridiculous feats our compassion for the poor animals would have prevented us