LIZARDS. 91 



surroundings. Within a few days after capture he permitted himself to be handled 

 without attempting to bite, and a few weeks later was accustomed, by way of saluta- 

 tion, to lick the hand presented to him with his broad blue-black flannel-like tongue. 

 Kept customarily in a box with a variety of other lizards, including Molochs and two 

 species of Egernia, he never manifested the slightest hostility towards them, even 

 though the latter more especially would snap up the food he was partaking of from 

 under his very nose. Moses' temper, in fact, as might be anticipated by a glance 

 at his large soft-expressioned eyes, was of the most even and amiable description. 



As in several allied types, the gastronomic proclivities of Trachysaurus are 

 essentially omnivorous. The particular individual that forms the subject of this notice 

 fed heartily and indifferently on animal or vegetable substances. Raw meat was 

 eagerly devoured, but as substantial and welcome a repast was made off lettuce leaves, 

 green peas, raw or cooked, and fruit of any kind. Moses' special treat, however, was 

 garden snails, a diet to which he was a stranger on his native heath, but was 

 introduced to experimentally at the Adelaide Botanic Gardens. This was veritable 

 turtle in his estimation. He would crush up and swallow these gasteropods, shells 

 and all, with the greatest gusto, and would even chase one on the floor if rolled 

 before him, like a kitten following a cotton bobbin. It would seem probable that the 

 presence of the calcareous shell enters extensively into this lizard's predilection for snails. 

 Some unexpected evidence of his craving for lime was evinced on a previous occasion, 

 when he happened, while at liberty in the garden, to stumble across a clump of roughly- 

 dried oyster shells ; these he immediately attacked, breaking off with his powerful jaws 

 fragment after fragment which were forthwith crushed up and swallowed.. 



A somewhat grotesque account of the Stump-tailed Lizard is contained in the 

 record of its discovery at Shark's Bay, in Western Australia, by Captain William 

 Dampier, " A Voyage to New Holland," in the year 1699. It reads as follows : 

 "The land animals that we saw here included a sort of guanos, of the same shape 

 and size with other guanos described, but differing from them in three remarkable 

 particulars, for these had a larger and uglier head and had no tail, and at the rump, 

 instead of a tail there, they had a stump of a tail which appeared like another head, 

 but not really such, being without mouth or eyes ; yet this creature seemed by this 

 means to have a head at each end, and, which may be reckoned a fourth difference, 

 the legs also seemed all four of them to be fore-legs, being all alike in shape and length, 

 and seeming by the joints and bending to be made as if they were to go indifferently 

 either head or tail foremost. They were speckled black and yellow, like toads, 



