2474 SCALED REPTILES 



hiding place behind a gilt picture frame. Punctually as the candles were lighted, it 

 made its appearance on the wall to be fed with its accustomed crumbs, and, if 

 neglected, it reiterated its sharp quick call of chic, chic, chit, till attended to. It was 

 of a delicate gray color, tinged with pink; and having by accident fallen on a work 

 table, it fled, leaving part of its tail behind it, which, however, it reproduced within 

 less than a month. . . . In an officer's quarters, in the fort at Colombo, a 

 gecko had been taught to come daily to the dinner table, and always made its ap- 

 pearance along with the dessert. The family were absent for some months, during 

 which the house underwent extensive repairs, the roof having been raised, the walls 

 stuccoed, and the ceilings whitened. It was naturally surmised that so long a sus- 

 pension of its accustomed habits would have led to the disappearance of the little 

 lizard, but on the return of its old friends, it made its entrance as usual at their 

 first dinner, the instant the cloth was removed.' ' Another Indian observer, Colonel 

 Tytler, writing of these house geckoes states that although several species " may in- 

 habit the same locality, yet, as a general rule, they keep separate and aloof from 

 each other; for instance, in a house the dark cellars may be the resort of one spe- 

 cies, the roof of another, and the crevices in the walls may be exclusively occupied 

 by a third species. However, at night they issue forth in quest of insects, and may 

 be found mixed up together in the same spot; but on the slightest disturbance, or 

 when they have done feeding, they return hurriedly to their particular hiding 

 places." So far as is known, all the members of the family agree with the house 

 geckoes in being insectivorous. With the exception of two peculiar New Zealand 

 species producing living young, all the geckoes appear to lay eggs, which are in- 

 closed in a round and hard shell, and are generally two in number. 



A few peculiar geckoes, assigned to three genera, and of which 



7 r . Hardwicke's gecko {Eublepharis hardwickei) is one of the best-known 



examples, differ from the true geckoes in being furnished with movable 



eyelids, and also in that their vertebrae are articulated by means of cup and ball 



joints. Consequently, those eyelid geckoes, as they may be termed, form a distinct 



family Eublepharida. 



THE SCALE- FOOTED LIZARDS 

 Family PTGOPODIDsE 



To the ordinary observer it might well appear that the whole of the snake-like 

 lizards, or those in which the body has become cylindrical and much elongated, 

 and the limbs either rudimentary or wanting, would pertain to a single family. 

 Such, however, is not the view of modern zoologists, who regard many of these 

 aberrant members of the suborder as having been independently derived from 

 several groups of fully-limbed forms, and thus having but little relationship among 

 themselves. Of these snake-like groups, one of the most remarkable is that of the 

 scale-footed lizards of Australia and New Guinea, which form a family comprising 

 six genera, all characterized by the retention of more or less well-marked rudiments 



