WALL-LIZARDS. 
Written and Illustrated with Photographs 
BY 
H. G. EF. SpPuRRELL. 
Ne EZ ARDS are a feature of Italy, and far from beimg its least attractive 
feature. This is saying a great deal. Italy is a land where almost everything 
is beautiful except the beggars, and even they have such winning manners that one 
grows to like them—provided, that is, that they try to appeal to one’s love of the 
picturesque and not to one’s horror of the pathological. Yet the lizards hold their own. 
They have one great advantage: they are to be seen everywhere. They can be found 
without a long journey upon a moribund mule, and they need no guide to point them 
out and explain them imaccurately with exasperating attempts to be humorous. 
There are lizards everywhere. They dash across the roads; they glance round the 
trunks of trees; and, to justify their name, they swarm upon every ruin and lurk in 
the chinks of every wall. 
During my first few days in Italy there seemed to me to be an endless number of 
species. They were alike in grace of form and activity of movement; but each a law 
unto itself in colour. I caught some, and noted the similarity of the plates on their 
heads. I later collected some of the more striking varieties. 
One of the handsomest types, and also perhaps the best known, is the green 
variety, as depicted in the first two photographs. These give some idea of its form 
and markings, and the second one of its proportions, as this is reproduced practically 
life size; but to its 
colouring no words can 
do justice. The ground- 
tint of the back was a 
brilliant metallic green. 
The head was green 
and bronze on the top, 
and white on the sides. 
The sides of the body 
were a bewildering 
COMMON GREEN FORM 
OF LIZARD 
