AUGUST. 207 



and make no effort to escape. There is a bare possibility 

 that the efforts on their part to escape, and fear, when 

 finally captured, may produce a hypnotic condition, or 

 something like it, but this would pass by and leave them 

 wild. This, I think, never occurs. Once in my hand, I 

 have never known a pine-tree lizard to be otherwise than 

 perfectly tame. But, in a large series in confinement, I 

 found that the sense of hearing was constantly brought 

 into play, as shown by their ludicrous actions when flies, 

 shut in a thin paper box, were placed near them. They 

 not only heard but recognized the noise a very impor- 

 tant matter, bearing as it does upon their intelligence. 

 Indeed, in the woods about May's Landing I found that 

 the lizards were perfectly familiar with many sudden 

 sounds and paid no attention whatever to them. Some of 

 these were the sonorous croak of the bull-frog, the quick 

 scream of the blue jay, the rattle of the golden-winged 

 woodpecker, and the coarse cry of the great-crested fly- 

 catcher. These were all unheeded, while my own cough- 

 ing, the whistling of a single note, or the loud utterance 

 of a word, caused them either to assume a make-ready 

 attitude or to dart away. On the other hand, have these 

 lizards any voice ? Their actions inter se are strongly 

 suggestive of the affirmative, but, so far as I am able to 

 determine, their utterances are confined to hissing, and 

 this I only heard when I provoked the creatures by the 

 sudden infliction of severe pain. Among a large number, 

 in nine weeks I never heard a voluntary hiss. This, how- 

 ever, is wholly negative evidence, and I am disposed to 

 believe that an animal possesses a voice, if its habits, in 

 their entirety, suggest that it has one. This perhaps un- 

 scientific method of reasoning arises, on my part, from 

 the fact of having long suspected that certain fishes and 

 salamanders had voices, before they were detected my 

 suspicions being based upon the habits, as a whole, of 



