14 



not for the tirst time in our lives — (JaiiifiUuiiainwa hiUiieata. Herr 

 Hvittlinger gave me a specimen of Lijcana iolas. This was the 

 first 1 had seen, but later I saw others, especially at one spot on the 

 Guntschnaberg, where I could watch these lovely blues flying in 

 the burning sun over the bushes of Colntea arborescens. Near this 

 spot I found one morning a fresh specimen of the beautiful noctuid, 

 (rrcviiiiKHles aUfira : this was quite a grand surprise. I also took 

 S<-olitanti(h-s orion, but this was not in good condition. 



To many people, the lizard is a loathsome creature and 

 venomous Avithal, but to a naturaUst of the cloudy North, the 

 lizard is one of the charms of a southern land. I will not pretend 

 that he is wholly without guile, for when one lizard has set his 

 mind on a fly or a larva and another has the same warm desire for 

 that particular insect, there will be a strenuous tight, which 

 generally ends in one or both combatants falling off the wall into 

 the dusty road, and scuttling away into the dust}^ herbage. But in 

 general the lizard is a sprightly and attractive little creature with an 

 inordinate love of the burning rays of the sun. There he will lie 

 hour after hour, in perfect contentment, pressed flat against a hot 

 stone with the sun's heat pouring down on his scaly back. You 

 put out youi hand to stroke him, and in a twinkling he has 

 vanished down a hole in the wall. In a minute or so you will see 

 his head at the entrance of the hole, and, if you remain quiet, he 

 will presently crawl up and resume his sun bath. Ttie colour of 

 these little lizards, in Bozen, is usually some tint of mottled brown, 

 but occasionally they assume a greenish hue, and more rarely an 

 almost orange colour. They occur on every sunny wall. These 

 walls are built of stones and contain many crevices in which the 

 lizards spend the wet days and the winter. It is said, they do not 

 retire till December, and in 1911 some of them were active again 

 before the middle of February. They are more abundant 

 on the sunny walls than on the rocks on the hillsides, but even 

 here ihey are quite common. We often saw them chasing 

 each other along the paths in the Archduke's walk, and when 

 very excited they spring though the air just above the 

 ground for a few inches. There was a wall in the Miihlbach 

 Lane on which lizards were especially abundant. There were 

 certain individuals which I saw nearly every morning for about two 

 months, they were nearly always on their own special stones and 

 they had their own holes. On the same wall were several in- 

 dividuals which had met with an injury to their tails, a most 

 common occurrence. These lizards, like other species have the 

 power of growing new tails to replace those lose, and instead of one 

 they often grow two tails. On this wall there was one with three 

 tails ; it had two tails and one of the two was branched. In size 

 these lizards varied from the small ones, which had just passed 

 their tirst winter, to elderly reptiles of some seven inches. These 

 were the Lacerta iiiKialis, or wall lizard. 



