5t THF GEISSOSAURI. 



which are rounded. Upon the head the plates are rather long, keeled, and project very 

 slightly over each other. The ears are distinct. The colour of the Anguine Lizard is 

 brown, and along each side runs a long yellow streak. 



A SECOND tribe of Lizards now conies before our notice. These are the GEISSOSAURI, 

 a title derived from two Greek words, the former signifying the eaves of a house, and the 

 latter a Lizard. As in this tribe there are many families, and more than eighty genera, it 

 will be impossible to give more than a very slight account of these reptiles, or even to 

 mention more than a small number selected as types of the large or small groups which 

 they represent. 



Indeed, the lower we descend in the scale of creation, the more numerous the species 

 seem to become, and the more perplexing is the task of selecting those species which arc 

 worthy of mention on account of their scientific characteristics, and yet possess sufficient 

 individuality to interest the general reader. 



To watch the greater number of reptiles in their wild state, is a task simply impossible 

 for any human being to achieve. Many reptiles live in dry and thirsty lands, where no 

 creatures but the white ant and the Lizard seem to acquire moisture, and through which 

 the traveller can only pass with hasty steps, dieading the delay of each minute lest his 

 precious store of water should fail, and leave him to perish by the most terrible of deaths. 



Others reside on the sides of precipitous rocks, over which the enterprising traveller 

 can only pass at hazard of life and limb, and in any case would not be able to watch the 

 proceedings of the shy and timid Lizards that find their home among these craggy recesses, 

 and retreat into them on the slightest alarm. But the chief residence of the reptile race is 

 to be found in hot climates, and in low, swampy ground, where the morasses are ever 

 filled with decaying vegetable matter, and exhale a soft, thick miasma, as deadly to the 

 white man as the fumes of arsenic, and injurious even to the dark-skinned native, who can 

 breathe unharmed a fetid atmosphere that would smite down his white master as quickly 

 and surely as if he were struck with a bullet, and who only attains his fullest develop- 

 ment under these conditions. 



In these dread regions, their seething putridity concealed by all the luxuriant vegetation 

 of tropical climes, like a royal mantle flung over a festering corpse, the reptile race abound, 

 the poisoned air being to these creatures the very breath of life, and the surrounding 

 decay the sustaining power of their existence. Indeed, the object of their lives seems 

 to be, by individual transmutation of poisons into living flesh, to destroy by slow but 

 certain degrees the mass of decaying vegetation, and so to prepare an abiding place for 

 beings of a higher order than themselves. 



On placing ourselves even in imagination amid such scenes, we seem to be transported 

 back into the former ages of our earth, when man could find no resting-place for his foot, 

 and no atmosphere which he could breathe and live ; when the greater part of the soil was 

 little more than soft mud, the air thick, dank, heavy, and overcharged with decomposition, 

 and the multitude of strange reptiles that bored their slimy way through the deep ooze, 

 crawled lazily upon the slowly hardening banks, or urged their devious course through 

 the turbid waters, were the physically ruling though morally subservient powers of the 

 world. 



Little is wanting to complete the illusion except to give to every object an increase of 

 dimensions, for the vegetation of those days was rank and luxuriant to a degree that is 

 now well indicated, though on a smaller scale, by the foliage of the tropics, and the huge 

 forms of the ancient and now extinct reptile race are closely reproduced by the more 

 familiar inhabitants of the swamp before us. 



As the expanse of putrefaction was greater in those epochs, so the miasma destroyers 

 were larger. Frogs and toads as big as calves, reptilian quadrupeds as large as elephants, 

 and reptilian bats expanding leatherywings as wide as those of the pelican, were fit inha- 

 bitants of the atmosphere which they breathed, and in which their mission was consum- 

 mated. Now that the marshy districts are smaller and less poisonous, the reptile race 

 that inhabits them is of smaller dimensions. 



The earth has now been so far purified by successive generations and regenerations of 



