114 CHAPTERS ON THE NATURAL HISTORY 



The first time he comes under your observation he may be de- 

 scending the trunk of some old cypress; you pause and cau- 

 tiously approach him; he gradually slows down his advance to a 

 deliberate walk, then stops, slowly raises the fore part of his 

 body, turns his head to one side, and surveys you with a pecul- 

 iarly knowing gaze, and perhaps even coldly winks once or 

 twice, at long intervals. While this performance is going on his 

 entire body becomes a dead brownish-bronze, ever and anon im- 

 perceptibly flushing a lighter tint. You make a step nearer, and 

 he suddenly wheels and heads his course up the trunk, squatting 

 very low as he does so; you come still a little nearer, and he ad- 

 vances up the tree in a spiral direction, until he is on the opposite 

 side of the trunk and out of your sight. At this moment per- 

 haps the thought seizes you to effect his capture, and you spring 

 forward to head him off; but in his cunning he has outgeneraled 

 3011; he is nowhere to be seen on the sides of the rugged old 

 trunk; so for a more general inspection you back away a few 

 steps, when, to your surprise, far above your head you behold 

 him stretched out along the first horizontal limb that extends 

 from the main trunk. Who would believe it, though; who would 

 take him for the same nimble little fellow that had just escaped 

 your attack. He is now almost completely clothed in a suit of 

 bright green, his crimson gular pouch protruding and retracting, 

 reminding one of the opening and shutting of some tropical but- 

 terfly in the noon-day sun. At other times, when the surround- 

 ing circumstances seemed to demand it, he would have donned a 

 coat made up of irregular patches of the two colors, with their 

 various shades, at his command. This power of protective mim- 

 icry on the part of Anolis, for as an example of this we must 

 certainly regard it, serves him best when he resorts, which he 

 frequently does, to the bright green stalks of certain fresh-water 

 reeds and plants that are found growing luxuriantly about the 

 bayous and canals of his native haunts. It was in some such 

 locality as this that, the other day, I observed one of the pretties! 

 examples of this very same protective resemblance, that OIK* 

 would care to witness, almost equal to that famous butterfly that 

 Wallace so admirably figures in his work upon the Malay Archi- 

 pelago, now so familiar to all of us. 



I had just scrambled over one of these so-called canals, that 

 divided, by the aid of an old fence, an extensive marshy trad 

 from a deserted field; this field was overgrown, in addition to 



