82 BRITISH LIZARDS 



type. Whether the excuse is a good one or not, the 

 charge is a perfectly true one, and the field worker, to 

 a certain extent at any rate, is not to be blamed. It 

 would, however, be inexcusable in a book dealing with 

 lizards alone not to try and make this matter clear to 

 the learner, — firstly, because it is an aspect that he 

 ought to be familiar with ; and secondly, because, unless 

 he does know it, he cannot tell a typical specimen 

 from an abnormal variation. If all field workers were 

 quite familiar with the typical scale arrangements of 

 our snakes and lizards, we should very soon be in 

 possession of a far greater amount of information as to 

 their variations than is obtainable at present. Every 

 specimen captured by a member of a field club should 

 be carefully examined to see whether it presents any 

 deviation from the normal in scaling, and if it does, 

 the record should be incorporated in the club transac- 

 tions and sent to one of the zoological journals. 



The present chapter, then, is an attempt to make 

 clear to the beginner, what is regarded by most field 

 workers as the uninteresting and rather mysterious 

 question of scaling arrangements of species. As a 

 matter of fact, once the type of a species is thoroughly 

 learnt, it becomes a matter of the greatest interest 

 to discover the variations from that type, and the 

 technical terms which are unavoidable in this con- 

 nection can be mastered with a few minutes' close 

 application. After following out the diagrammatic 

 representation of the relative positions of the various 



