text:  It would appear that Mr Swainson who is characterised as a "morbid and presumptuous man " had been at variance--on personal as well as scientific grounds--with Mr Waterton from whom he received a castigation for his ornithological heresies in a letter published in 1837; but his retaliation was delayed for two years when in an account of the cayman published in Lardner's _Cabinet Cyclopaedia_ he describes it as "on land a slow-paced and even timid animal; so that an active boy armed with a small hatchet might easily dispatch one