Great Salamanders and their Associates 



species were fairly well covered with scales, 

 although these were so thiu that they could 

 have offered little real protection against the 

 enemies by which they were surrounded, unless 

 it were by making them more or less unpleas- 

 ant eating. 



Armor has practically been discarded by 

 modern frogs, toads, and salamanders, but one 

 or two genera of frogs (^Epliippifer and Cei^a- 

 tophrys) having any suggestion of it, and this 

 in the shape of bony plates imbedded in the 

 back and serving neither for use nor ornament, 

 merely as reminiscences of the time that armor 

 was popular. There is one order of amphib- 

 ians, the Ophiomorpha or snake-formed, whose 

 members look very much like great earthworms, 

 and have the same burrowing habits, in which 

 there are rows of minute scales that may also 

 be considered as indications of the armor of 

 former members of the race. 



It was a strange world in which the Stego- 



cephala dwelt, one quite as strange and weird 



in its way as that imagined by H. G. Wells in 



his First Man in the Moon, a world wherein 



9 121 



