184 Animal Life 
smooth tennis lawn, sheets being spread over the area included within the purview of 
the camera, and across these sheets the animals were induced to run. ‘The photographs 
on page 181 will assist better than words to illustrate the quaint attitudes assumed by 
the running lizards. In these racing records the relatively small Australian tree lzard 
was notable for maintaining the most nearly vertically erect carriage. ‘‘ Robin” at his 
best assumed the distingwé airs of a Piccadilly dandy, while “Frills” put in a sprint 
with an accompanying comportment that might excusably bring tears of envy to the 
eyes of Mr. Murdoch or any other member of the champion Australian cricket team, 
In face of the demonstrated extensive prevalence of bipedal locomotion among various 
distinctly organised lizard groups, it is scarcely possible to get away from the conclusion 
that the habit has been handed (or should it be “footed” ?) down to them from their 
primeeval ancestors the Mesozoic Dinosaurs, reptiles which to a very much wider extent 
were accustomed to walk erect. A restored skeleton of one of these huge extinct 
creatures, the Iguanodon, some thirty feet in length, with an example of the fmilled 
lizard brought from Australia by the writer and set up in its bipedal attitude from one 
of the photographs from life here reproduced, will be found side by side in the 
geological galleries of the Natural History Museum. They constitute there an 
appropriate illustration, 
notwithstanding the dis- 
parity in bulk, of the 
bond of affinity m the 
matter of a singularly 
developed method of 
perambulation that sub- 
sists betwixt the reptiles 
of to-day and those of 
the fossil past. 
“Se unchyae sate 
years since, treated us in 
his “Comic Almanack”’ 
with a set of humorous 
cartoons representing 
what might have hap- 
pened if the Dino- 
saurians had perpetuated 
and more fully developed their bipedal attributes in place of evoluting into quadrupeds. 
Man under these conditions was a very inferior animal. Had Mr. Punch been a little 
more up-to-date in reptilian lore he might have “pointed the moral and adorned his 
tale” with a reference to some of those eccentric yet old-fashioned living lizards that 
continue to tread in their ancestors’ footprints. 
| Vapplh Sj rb 
THE OCELLATED LIZARD. 
[In the next number of Antmat Lire will begin a series of practical articles on the keeping ot ‘‘ Uncommon Pets.” 
The articles will have the advantage of being written by a naturalist who has had personal experience of all the animals 
with which he will deal.] 
