Reptiles and Batrachians of the Edinburgh District. 497 
one of a very dark brown (almost black) colour, and another 
much greener than usual—the former on dark peaty soil 
near the top of a hill, the latter on a grassy bank by a 
woodland path. Both were adult females. Apart, however, 
from the influence of environment on the coloration, my 
experience is that males are, generally speaking, darker than 
females. A living female now before me agrees well with the 
description and figure in Bell’s “ British Reptiles,” except in 
having a pale buff line above and another below the broad 
fascia on each side. When held at certain angles between 
the observer and the light, the green lustre is very apparent, 
but this entirely disappears when the creature is placed in 
an opposite position, leaving it of a warm sandy brown. 
The under parts are of a greenish straw colour, and the total 
length is 140 millimetres (54 inches), of which 80 represent 
the tail. An adult male taken at the same time as the 
above was very similarly coloured on the upper parts, but 
the belly was bright orange spotted with black—an excellent 
sexual character. Their colours harmonised exceedingly 
well with their surroundings (the habitat was a grassy bank 
surmounted by a wall), yet a young male, fully more than 
half-grown, found along with them, was of a nearly uniform 
dark brown.* 
The total length of the largest I have measured—a female 
—was 149 millimetres. Examples which had evidently at 
one time lost parts of their tails have been met with on two 
occasions—the re-grown part being characterised by the 
smaller size of the scales, and the whole tail being pro- 
portionally shorter than in other specimens. 
ANGUIS FRAGILIS, Linn. THE SLOW-WORM. 
The Slow-worm or Blind-worm—a harmless lizard despite 
its serpentine form,—though known to occur in a number 
of places from one end of the valley to the other, must be 
looked upon as decidedly local and nowhere common. Com- 
pared with the previous species, it is scarcely so often met 
1 According to Fatio, young examples are always much darker than 
normal adults, 
