That being very
young, it was but two feet long, and had bracelets of gold upon its
feet. There is no giving credit to these stories, said Mr Banks, for I
was told the other day that a crocodile had ear-rings, and you know that
could not be true, because crocodiles have no ears. Ah, sir, said the
man, these sudara oran are not like other crocodiles; they have five
toes upon each foot, a large tongue that fills their mouth, and ears
also, although they are indeed very small.

How much of what these people related, they believed, cannot be known;
for there are no bounds to the credulity of ignorance and folly. In the
girl's relation, however, there are some things in which she could not
be deceived; and therefore must have been guilty of wilful falsehood.
Her father might perhaps give her a charge to feed a crocodile, in
consequence of his believing that it was his sudara; but its coming to
her out of the river when she called it by the name of white king, and
taking the food she had brought it, must have been a fable of her own
invention; for this being false, it was impossible that she should
believe it to be true. The girl's story, however, as well as that of the
man, is a strong proof that they both firmly believed the existence of
crocodiles that are sudaras to men; and the girl's fiction will be
easily accounted for, if we recollect that the earnest desire which
every one feels to make others believe what he believes himself, is a
strong temptation to support it by unjustifiable evidence. And the
averring what is known to be false, in order to produce in others the
belief of what is thought to be true, must, upon the most charitable
principles, be imputed to many, otherwise venerable characters, through
whose hands the doctrines of Christianity passed for many ages in their
way to us, as the source of all the silly fables related of the Romish
saints, many of them not less extravagant and absurd than this story of
the white king, and all of them the invention of the first relater.[154]

[Footnote 154: It is no doubt very true, that many of the _pious
frauds_, as they have been called, are as absurd as the story alluded
to; but really there does not seem to be any occasion whatever for
lugging them in here, in order to shew a sort of malicious contempt of
those who framed them. Dr Hawkesworth, it is very clear, kept himself
much on the look-out for subjects capable of serving as baits for the
greedy scoffers of his