Crocodiles, Turtles, and Lizards. 23 



out to us from the dim past a phantom from the Genesis. 

 Its speech is silence, and yet august in dumbness, its voice 

 is more than trumpets; the walled-in cities of old super- 

 stition, the sacred citadels of ignorance, topple into ruins 

 before it. 



It is a word straight from the Demiurge himself, whispered 

 to us through the rock galleries that stretch back from Now 

 to Then a single word spoken from the " In the beginning " 

 a worshipful thing. I never go to the British Museum 

 without passing the model of this archaeopteryx, the first 

 of the birds. The lizard-fowl is a perpetual reverence 

 to me. 



Yet again, contemplate the way in which these creatures 

 gradually shorten their legs as skinks, lose them altogether 

 as amphisbaenas, hesitate for a while as blindworms, and 

 then become actual snakes ophidian, viperine, terrible ! 



They commence with the pretty agile little things of our 

 English sandy heaths, that are the " beasts-of-prey " to the 

 tiny fly- folk who range among the grass as among forests, 

 and find their lakes in dewdrops, their pleasure-parks on 

 plaintain leaves. To them succeed the amphibious lizards 

 of the New World, who feed on small snakes, mice, and 

 birds larger creatures, a yard in length, splendidly painted 

 with yellow on a black ground. So to the water-lizards of 

 the Old World, the crocodile-like "monitors," which so 

 tradition used to fancy whistled a note of warning to 

 Leviathan when danger threatened, albeit it eats the croco- 

 dile's eggs, and the young ones too. In revenge, the old 

 crocodiles eat it. Next is that wondrous family of the 

 " short-tongued " lizards, the arboreal iguanas, contrasting 

 notably in their fearsome appearance with the floral loveli- 

 ness of their tropical woodland haunts. Here, too, is the 

 basilisk the " dragon " of the Middle Ages in miniature 

 heraldic, grotesquely heterodox ; and the sea-lizard, a dread- 

 ful-looking thing that feeds upon the sea-weeds a mile from 



