a ae 
as mention tl 
61 
I afterwards found that this fact had not escaped the observation 
of the indefatigable Robinson ; for, on consulting his manuscript vo- 
lumes in Kingston, I met with the following notes, recorded nearly a 
century ago :—‘ No author that I have met with has observed that 
any animals of the Lizard-kind are viviparous; yet I have by accident 
discovered that the smooth Snake-lizard of Jamaica brings its young 
forth alive. Mr. Long having caught one of these alive, tied it all 
night upon a table with a thread, and in the morning found a young 
one or two lying near the other, which was a full-grown one. Being 
at a loss to account for this, as imagining that all the Lizard-kind 
were oviparous, he called upon me to know my sentiments. It ap- 
peared very plain to me that this animal was viviparous; nor does 
this seem strange to me, when I consider that some of the Serpent- 
kind are also viviparous, viz. the Viper and Rattle-snake. 
«Some time in August 1760, as I was looking over a parcel of 
preserved lizards, finding amongst the rest one of these Snake-lizards 
full-grown, with the belly very much distended, in which state they 
may be often seen,—I took my penknife, and endeavoured to cut the 
abdomen open, but found it so well defended by a covering of very 
small hard scales, like those of a fish, that my knife would not enter 
till I had scraped them away, when opening the abdomen I found two 
beautiful young ones, about two inches long.”’ (Rob. MSS. iv. 47.) 
The stomach is a lengthened sac. In specimens that I examined 
I found small cockroaches, fragments of crickets, &c., insects which 
live in heaps of stones. In one specimen I observed a few slender, 
rather short, intestinal thread-worms, loose among the abdominal 
viscera. 
Sloane’s ‘Lacerta minor levis’ (tab. 273. fig. 5) is certainly the 
present species, and is not a bad representation. His description, 
however, like most of his zoological notes, is full of confusion and 
error. He says, ‘‘ This is bigger than the former [which I think to 
be the female of the Purple-tailed Anolis*], smooth, having a great 
many brown spots, otherwise much the same [!], laying a very small, 
white, hard-shelled egg (fig. 6) [which is however the egg of a com- 
mon little Spheriodactylus], nestling in rotten-holed trees [here he 
confounds it with Gecko rapicauda], leaping from one bough to 
another [here with the Anoles] ; ’tis very common among old pali- 
sades, &c.” It is very evident to me that Sloane’s zoological notes 
were but in a slight degree the result of his own observation; he 
trusted to the loose reports of negroes and others, generally correct 
of something or other, but very often misapplied, the local names and 
habits of widely different species being huddled and mingled together 
in almost inextricable confusion. That fruitful source of error, the 
application of the same names to different species in different (and 
sometimes in the same) localities, to which I have alluded in my 
‘ Birds of Jamaica,’ p. 177, against which a naturalist should always 
be on his guard in a foreign country, appears to have misled our 
venerable naturalist. Nor does it seem to me disrespectful to the 
name of that great man thus to expose his mistakes, since I feel able 
* I hope to describe this species in a future memoir.—P. H. G. 
