turtles. Alligators grow very slowly. At fifteen years of age they are only two feet long. A twelve-footer may reasonably be supposed to be seventy-five years old. Alligators are extensively utilized. Their hides can be tanned into an excellent leather, which has become expensive. The teeth, obtained by rotting the skulls in the ground, are of fine ivory, and valued for carving into ornaments. They are worth about $2 a pound (of 50 to 75 teeth). Both flesh and eggs are eaten by some persons, and the eggs are valued because they can be hatched in boxes of warm sand, yielding young alligators to be sold as pets, or killed and made into curious ornaments. See Cayman.
ALLIGATOR AP'PLE. See Custard Apple.
ALLIGATOR FISH. A fish of the family Agonidæ, whose members have an elongated angular body covered with large bony plates that form a coat of mail. The best known one is Podothecus acipenserinus, a species twelve inches long, found on the northern Pacific coast.
ALLIGATOR GAR. The great gar, Litholepsis tristœchus, of the rivers of the Southern United States, Cuba, Mexico, and Central America, which is greenish in color and sometimes reaches a length of ten feet. See Gar.
ALLIGATOR LIZ'ARD. Any lizard of the
iguanid genus Sceloporus, which contains a great
number of small species whose heads are not
spiny and which have flat scales and no gular
fold. They vary in color, but are generally dull
above, with one or two light lines along each
side and black cross lines or blotches on the back.
The inferior surfaces, however, are likely to be
brilliantly colored. "The throat and sides of the
belly are usually of some shade of blue (some-
times purple). When the animal raises the head,
as it habitually does, the brilliant colors of the
throat are visible, but those of the sides are
much less apparent. All these colors are most
conspicuous in the males." (Cope.) These lizards
are conspicuous objects everywhere in the south-
western United States and Mexico, running up trees and dodging about the branches, scampering over rocks, hiding in their fissures, or scaling the sides of stone walls and adobe houses. One small species, very variable in color, Sceloporus undulatus, is the common "fence lizard" of the eastern and central States. They are exceedingly swift and spry, but perfectly harmless, and increase by means of eggs laid in the sand and left to hatch by the warmth of the sun.
ALLIGATOR PEAR. See Avocado Pear.
ALLIGATOR TER'RAPIN, Tortoise, or Turtle. A snapping turtle, especially the long-necked, long-tailed, very large species (Macrochelys lacertina) of the southern Mississippi Valley, which may weigh 50 or 60 pounds, and is valued as food. See Turtle.
AL'LINGHAM, William (1824-89). An Anglo-Irish poet, born at Ballyshannon. Donegal. He won attention by Poems (1850), some of which had previously appeared in English periodicals. In the same year he came to London and was appointed to a subordinate post in the customs. He received a civil pension of £60 in consideration of his services to literature in 1864; married Helen Patterson, a well-known water-color painter, in 1874, and in the same year became editor of Fraser's Magazine. He died at Hampstead. His first collection of poems was followed by Day and Night Songs (1854), a new edition of which (1855) was illustrated with woodcuts from designs by Arthur Hughes, Rossetti, and Millais. Among subsequent volumes were Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland, an ambitious but unsuccessful narrative poem (1864); In Fairy Land, illustrated by Richard Doyle (1870), Songs, Ballads and Stories (1877), The Fairies (1883), Flower Pieces, and Other Poems, with designs by Rossetti (1888). Mary Donnelly is perhaps the best known of Allingham's many natural and graceful lyrics.
ALLIOLI, al'ls-O'le, Joseph Franz (1793-
1873). A Roman Catholic biblical scholar. In
1830-36 he issued at Nuremberg, in six volumes,
Braun's annotated German translation of the
Bible from the Vulgate, but so revised as to be
practically a new work. It was the first of its
kind to receive Papal approbation.
AL'LISON, William Boyd (1829—). An American legislator. He was born at Perry, O., attended Allegheny and Western Reserve colleges; studied law and practiced in Ohio until 1857, when he removed to Iowa. During the Civil War he was a member of the Governor's staff. Elected as a Republican, he served in the House of Representatives from 1863 to 1871; was elected to the United States Senate, in 1872, and has been reëlected five times. He has been an active member of the Senate, serving on many commissions. The essential feature of the coinage act of 1878, known as the Bland-Allison Act, or more properly the Allison Act, was due to him. He was one of the representatives of the United States at the Brussels Monetary Conference, in 1892. He has several times been a prominent candidate in Republican national conventions for the Presidential nomination. Both President Garfield and President Harrison offered him the Treasury portfolio.
ALLIT'ERA'TION (Lat. ad, to + littera, letter). The frequent occurrence of the same or similar letters or sounds. In old German, Anglo-Saxon, and Scandinavian poetry, alliteration took the place of rhyme. This kind of verse, in its strict form, required that two stressed syllables in the first hemistich and one in the second hemistich should have the same sound, if consonantal, as in the following Anglo-Saxon line:
Flota ^Smig heals ^ugle gelicost. (The boat with bow of foam likest a bird.)
Alliterative poems continued to be written in English after it had assumed its modern form. The most remarkable is Piers Plowman, a poem of the fourteenth century, of which the following is a specimen:
In a somer seson whan soft was the sonne.
Even after the introduction of rhyme, allitera- tion continued to be largely used as an embellish- ment of poetry, and is so, though to a less ex- tent, to this day:
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, The furrow followed free. — Coleridge.
Alliteration is not confined to verse; the charm that lies in it exercises great influence on human speech generally, as may be seen in many current phrases and proverbs in all languages: example, "life and limb," "house and home," "wide wears," "tight tears," etc. It often constitutes part of the point and piquancy of witty writing. Among modern writers this use of al-
