The Zoologist— March, 1869. 1593 



Collected Observa(io7is on British Reptiles. 

 By Edward Nkwman. 



The nurnber of reptiles inhabiting Britain is so small that it is 

 difficult, if not impossible, to give any satisfactory idea of their 

 affinities or of the general characters of the class to which they 

 belong, unless we emancipate ourselves entirely from the geographical 

 restrictions which these small islands impose on us, and regard both 

 the class of reptiles and its various divisions as they are ascertained 

 to exist on the whole surface of the habitable globe. We learn from 

 the records of travellers, verified by specimens in museums, that some 

 seas are teeming with turtles, some rivers with crocodiles, some forests 

 with huge boas, and some sandy deserts with lizards of every different 

 structure. And we learn from the testimony of the eternal rocks that 

 at some remote period huge reptiles peopled the earth to the exclusion 

 of man, of sucklers and of birds. We must not, then, ignore either the 

 past or the present prevalence of reptile forms, but must consider the 

 class synthetically as a whole, analytically only as known in the small 

 islands we chance to inhabit. 



Reptiles constitute the third primary division of endosteate animals, 

 and are distinguished from the members of the other three by the total 

 absence of any deciduous covering of the skin. It has often struck me 

 as remarkable that neither Linneus, Cuvier, De Blainville, Geoffroy 

 St. Hilaire, nor Dumeril and Bibron have noticed the simple and 

 obvious external distinguishing character of reptiles. The epidermis, 

 or outer skin, of quadrupeds is clothed with hair, of birds with feathers, 

 of fishes with scales, but in reptiles it is uncovered, perfectly naked. 

 It is not extraordinary that our natural-history book-makers, having 

 uo practical knowledge of the subject, should have overlooked so vital 

 an omission, but it is extraordinary that the men whose names I have 

 enumerated above, each one of whom thought for himself, failed to 

 observe so important a diagnostic. When, in 1856, I published my 

 little treatise on the ' Physiological Classification of Animals,' I had 

 no idea that the distinguishing external or structural peculiarity of 

 reptiles remained unnoticed. This omission is not simply such : it is 

 accompanied by many positive errors ; thus Merrem and others have 

 a reptilian order Squamata, and Cuvier repeatedly uses the word 

 ecailles in describing the covering of snakes and lizards. The pro- 

 cesses in question, whether described as squmnce or ecailles, are pro- 

 jections, folds or rugosities of the under skin, and are not deciduous, 



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