Lizards. 43 



broken off, developed at the crack an accessory tail, 

 while the original tail yet remained and became re- 

 paired at its injured part, thus giving a bifid extremity 

 to the tail. 



Some lizards are snakelike and ringed, like the 

 amphisbaenas, with no projecting limb-rays, but in all 

 these traces of the limb girdles are persistent, although 

 they may not show superficially, as in the blind worm 

 a pretty and innocent, though much maligned, native 

 of Great Britain, whose scientific name Anguis fragilis, 

 expresses the brittleness before referred to. The 

 common wall-lizards are typical examples of the long 

 fork-tongued division of the order. The monitors 

 and teguexins, or safeguards of the tropics, are so called 

 because they are supposed to give warning of the 

 presence of crocodiles. They reach the length of six 

 to eight feet, and are among the largest of living 

 lizards, although they are but pigmies when compared 

 with the extinct forms of which fossil remains have 

 been found, sometimes exceeding thirty feet in length. 



The American iguanas are large-sized lizards 

 which are used as food ; they usually bear tufted 

 crests on the back, and have thick short tongues. 

 Some lizards have large lateral flaps of skin : thus the 

 frilled lizard of Australia bears on each side of the 

 neck a wide fold of skin like a ruff or Queen Eliza- 

 beth collar ; others, like the little flying dragon, bear 

 on each side a winglike fold, supported on extended 

 ribs, and these, together with the long conical chin- 

 pouch, give this creature a very extraordinary appear- 

 ance. The appropriately named Moloch Jwrridus of 

 Australia bristles most repulsively with conical spines, 



