44 SNAKES. 



plants, which, to use Darwin's words, * with animals, though 

 most remote in the scale of nature, are bound together by 

 a web of complex relations.' You may place the dove at 

 one end of the chain and the crocodile at the other, without 

 one broken link. The earliest bird which palaeontology 

 has revealed had teeth in its bill, claws on the end of its 

 wings, and a long tail with feathers growing out of it, like a 

 pinnate leaf. 



We see those strange forms reproduced in the gardens of 

 the Crystal Palace. Lizards with the head of a bird and 

 other combinations, the Pterosauria or w^inged - lizards, 

 Ichthyosauria or fish-lizards, of which some representative 

 types still exist in the African Lepidosiren and the Mexican 

 Axolotl, which have puzzled modern physiologists as much as 

 the Carolina tortoise puzzled Lawson ; for whether to call 

 them reptiles or fishes was long a disputed question. Dr. 

 Carpenter, in his Zoology, reckons fifty-eight of such links 

 among reptiles ; as, for instance, the transition from turtles 

 to crocodiles, from tortoises to lizards, in which latter we 

 find the legs growing shorter, till they are gone altogether 

 in the blindworms and amphisbaenas. These again branch 

 off to the cecilias, and the cecilias to worms on one side, 

 and to frogs on the other, having the form of a snake, but 

 the skin of the batrachian. There are the Ophiosaurians, 

 snake-lizards, and Saurophidians, lizard-snakes; there are 

 lizard-like frogs and frog-like lizards ; some of them begin- 

 ning life with gills, and becoming air-breathers afterwards, 

 others of saurian aspect retaining their gills through life ; 

 and from these, again, is the transition between reptiles and 

 fishes. There are diminutive snakes of worm-like aspect, 



