The hemys, or fresh-water tortoise, leaves the water and lays its
eggs. It digs a hole of a casklike shape, and deposits therein the
eggs; after rather less than thirty days it digs the eggs up again and
hatches them with great rapidity, and leads its young at once off to
the water. The sea-turtle lays on the ground eggs just like the eggs
of domesticated birds, buries the eggs in the ground, and broods
over them in the night-time. It lays a very great number of eggs,
amounting at times to one hundred.
Lizards and crocodiles, terrestrial and fluvial, lay eggs on land.
The eggs of lizards hatch spontaneously on land, for the lizard does
not live on into the next year; in fact, the life of the animal is
said not to exceed six months. The river-crocodile lays a number of
eggs, sixty at the most, white in colour, and broods over them for
sixty days: for, by the way, the creature is very long-lived. And
the disproportion is more marked in this animal than in any other
between the smallness of the original egg and the huge size of the
full-grown animal. For the egg is not larger than that of the goose,
and the young crocodile is small, answering to the egg in size, but
the full-grown animal attains the length of twenty-six feet; in
fact, it is actually stated that the animal goes on growing to the end
of its days.
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