8 ANIMAL LIFE PAST AND PRESENT. 



armour for the protection of the body is an encum- 

 brance rather than an advantage as a means of pro- 

 tection against attack. 



The same story is told still more clearly in that 

 group of animals now represented by the frogs, newts, 

 and their allies, which are popularly reckoned among 

 Eeptiles, but which naturalists, with that tendency to 

 multiply terms for which they are so celebrated, dis- 

 tinguish as Amphibians. Thus during, and for some 

 time after, that distant epoch to which we have already 

 referred, when the coal-forests waved over what is 

 now Britain, there lived a number of salamander-like 

 creatures, termed, from the complicated internal fold- 

 ings found in the teeth of many of them, Labyrinth- 

 odonts.* In these creatures the under surface of 

 the chest was protected by three large bony plates ; 

 while in some cases an armour of scale-like bones 

 covered the rest of the body. All the existing frogs, 

 salamanders, and such-like creatures have, however, 

 totally dispensed with the panoply of their fore- 

 fathers; and have, as we all know, a soft and naked 

 skin. 



The true Eeptiles, in which the naturalist includes 

 crocodiles, lizards, snakes, tortoises, and turtles, as well 

 as a host of extinct forms, appear, speaking meta- 

 phorically, to have held divided opinions as to whether 

 a bony coat-of-mail was or was not a thing to be re- 

 tained as a permanency ; since, while some extinct and 

 early groups never had any armour at all, others have 



* See Chapter IV. 



